On Making Friends

I have finally figured out a quantitative reason for why it is so hard to enter into meaningful relationships at college. In retrospect, I'm really surprised that I haven't figured this out sooner. It all has to do with the sheer amount of time that you spend with people.

In high school, you spend at least and hour interacting with the same 30-60 people every day, five days a week. Through even such a minute interaction every day, you slowly build up a firm relationship and gain a good basic understanding of who those people are because you spend at least five hours a week with them, often more.

Once you have built up such a solid foundation for a relationship with 30-60 people, it is inevitable that you will find people that even more closely relate to you and your personality preferences. That being the case, you start to hang out with them at school and end up spending quite a bit more time with them, whether it be in class, at lunch, or in the halls. Even if you only increase your interaction with these people to two hours a day in school, you are suddenly spending ten hours a week or more with them and you get to really hash out the intimacies of your relationship with them, even if you don't do so verbally.

Now, the people that you hang out this much with at school tend to hang out together through simple proximity if not by like mindedness. This group of friends will often form a network or mesh of relationships and build one single giant relationship together, making a sort of family. They will hang out together outside of school, go places together, do things together, often spending forty or more hours a week in each other's presence. This allows ample time to build quality relationships fairly quickly.

After four years of this type of interaction, you leave high school with a very close knit group of friends. Even with those people you've only had low-grade positive interaction with, the sheer amount of time that you interact with them tends to transcend group barriers, allowing for all of them to become your friends in earnest.

Compare that to College life. In a large college where you are able to take hundreds of different classes in different orders, it is unlikely that you will have more than a few people that are the same in different classes. The average class only meets two to three times a week and has generally over a hundred people in them. That being the case, you are lucky if you spend more than three hours a week with the same people that you do not know.

Spending so little time with people that you do not know significantly slows down the initial process of getting to know people and in turn, slows everything else down immensely. Therefore, what would normally take only a month or two may take a year or more, lessening the possibilities of forming well developed relationships.

To make matters worse, the people that you see in your classes for one semester are very likely to not be in class with you next semester. Therefore, all of the work that you put into forming a foundation of a relationship comes pretty much to naught. There will likely be a few people that you see from class to class, but instead of forming a relationship with them based on genuine like, you tend to form a relationship with them out of the desperate need for some sort of connection with anyone and the fact that you've had a previous class with them provides that connection.

This is the reason that RSOs and church groups become so popular on campus. Unlike with classes, these groups provide a guarantee that you will interact with the same people week after week in a setting that assures that you have some sort of common interest. The problem with these groups is that they are often too narrow. Even though you may have something in common with the people therein, that does not necessarily mean that your personalities will match up. Since most RSOs tend to hang out in groups of thirty or less to make a practical event (though they may have larger meetings or special events), there is a very small pool to find someone who meshes well with you. More often than not, you will find a few people who mesh with you, but rather awkwardly and with these people, you will form the rocky foundations of a friendship. Since RSOs only meet a few times a week for a couple of hours, the development of these rocky foundations are slow going and leav lots of gaps, making them even rockier.

Because the foundations for these friendships are often rocky, they are also unstable. This sort of unstable friendship that falls apart where the people's friendships start to unmesh and tends to cause disagreements that sabotage the friendship as a whole just because the people involved have a hard time trusting one another, not knowing exactly how one feels about the parts of themselves that they are insecure about.

I may be wrong, but I really feel that this is the problems that I've been having trouble understanding since I've come to college and the reason that I find it extremely hard to make friends. I never could pinpoint the process before, but I think I've got it down now.

The question is, how do I apply this knowledge?