The Worst Part Of Graduation

I sometimes like to think of the strength of a friendship as something like a graph, where the x-axis is time spent together (not time in general), and y-axis is the strength of the friendship. If you look at it this way, there’s a few different types of friends.

Firstly, we have close friends, people who you are able to reach a high level of friendship with.

Becoming good friends quickly is a sign that you’ll likely become close friends later. But as we see with the bottom line, you can also become close friends later without starting out super fast.

If you’re at this stage, you’re probably going to spend more time together in the future. I think there’s a certain point in a friendship at which you’re going to intentionally hang out with each other and talk to each other often, even without whatever initially brought you together (work, school, clubs, etc.). Let’s call that point the “line of sustainability,” the line where above it, your friendship is sustainable without outside structure. And let’s add it to the graph.

The close friendships pass the line of sustainability fairly quickly. But let’s add some more. What about friendships that don’t pass the line of sustainability? You probably have some people like that - people that you’re only friends with because they happen to be around and they’re decent enough people. Maybe they’re people you only see at work, or friends of friends, or whatever. On the graph, they might look something like this:

You might spend a lot of time with them, but as soon as the shared activity is gone, you’re probably not going to see them again. You might enjoy spending time with them, but if they moved away tomorrow, you wouldn’t be too sad.

Now let’s add some people in the middle - people above the line of sustainability, but not super close friends, either. We’ll say, for lack of a better term, that these are medium friends.

Our graph is getting a little confusing at this point, but hopefully you can get the idea - some of the medium friends look like close friends to start, some of them look like unsustainable friendships to start, but the more time you spend with them, the more you realize that they are medium friends. You’ll hang out with them and keep in touch, but they’re not quite close friends.

But our graph doesn’t quite represent reality. There’s a couple of simplifications that we’ve made. Firstly, in real life friendships can decline in strength, of course. Some friendships might dip below the line of sustainability and fall apart. And secondly, it takes a lot of time together to get to the right side of this graph. All my examples make it pretty far across the chart, but in real life you’re going to have a lot more people that you haven’t spent enough time with to really know where the friendship is heading.

In real life, you might have a graph that looks something like this (using a small example to not overwhelm you with lines):

Here you’ve got a clear close friend, medium friend, and unsustainable friend. You’ve also got three newer friends who aren’t quite at the line of sustainability yet, but as you spend more time with them, it seems like they’ve got a shot at making it there, especially the two on the left who might even become close friends.

The last way in which the graph doesn’t represent real life, at least for me, is that I’m a senior in college. In about a week, I’m going to graduate. Here’s what that will do to the graph.

Anything below the line of sustainability is about to be eliminated. The short lines with a high slope on the left, people who could have become good friends given maybe even just 1 or 2 more months, are going to disappear. There are a lot of people like this - people who I recently became better friends with, just not quite enough to make it above the line.

The last few weeks I’ve been reminded of this constantly. Every time I see one of these people, I wonder if it’s going to be the last time. It’s especially sad when I have some sort of bonding experience with them, knowing that we could have become friends but there just isn’t quite enough time left. Friendship is some combination of time spent, intensity of shared experience, and connection, and when you take away one of the factors you don’t end up with much. It’s been fun, for sure, but you know the feeling when you think “hey this person is actually pretty cool and I want to spend more time with them?” Usually, it feels good because you know you now have a chance to see them a lot more. It feels a lot worse when you realize you may never see them again and so that experience is the only one you get.

It makes sense to miss your closer friends when you graduate - they’re your friends, you enjoy spending time with them, of course you miss them. But you’ll probably see them again, even if it takes a while. So I don’t feel like that’s the worst part. I feel like I’m going to miss the potential friends more - because unlike my friends that are above the line of sustainability, there are some of these people that I will just never see again. Throughout my life I’ve said “See you!” thousands of times, and it’s usually been true, but in the last couple weeks I think it’s been more of a 50/50 chance.

So all this is pretty depressing. This is now the point in the article where I should explain the solution to all of this - keep in contact with everyone with one simple trick! But I think I’d be giving false hope if I did that. I think I inevitably will lose a lot of these potential friends, and if you’re graduating, you will too. You can’t lower the line of sustainability to zero, and even if you could, you probably wouldn’t want to.

Most of the reason for this is just the dramatic shift in structure that is about to happen. I will never again have a college club meeting, so anyone who I mostly saw at college club meetings will require effort to see again. The people who I randomly saw because they were close friends or roommates of my friends will be in different cities, so I won’t randomly see them anymore. I’ll never have to take a class again, so I won’t be able to study with people in my classes who I somewhat know. All of the structure that I built up in the last four years will disappear.

I can’t keep every potential friendship I have now. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to preserve any of them. So here are some things that I’m going to do in order to preserve as many as possible.

• Make sure I’m connected to people on social media, and potentially start posting more myself. I’ve noticed that I feel more connected to people personally when I read their posts on social media and sort of stay updated on what they’re up to (to a point, at least). It’s a little one-sided, though - personally, I’ve posted on Instagram one time in the last six years. It might be a good idea to change that.

• Take advantage of opportunities to meet with people in person. It feels to me like spending time with people in person is something like 10 times better at forming connections than basically anything else. So when people happen to be nearby, I want to actually make plans with them, instead of just half-heartedly asking when they want to meet up.

• Figure out what method of messaging people will respond on. If someone frequently deletes their Instagram account, I probably don’t want my main way of communication with them to be Instagram DMs. I think this honestly matters a lot more than people generally think, especially when it comes to people who are not really close friends.

• Keep track of what people are doing and where they are. I often find that I’m not particularly good at remembering specific details about people, such as where they’ll be working in the future. I hope to notice when I don’t know this about someone, and ask them about it. I can’t take advantage of opportunities to meet with people if I don’t know where they’re going to be, and as a bonus there will be less embarrassing moments where someone remembers my entire life story and I then ask “So what do you do for work again?”

• Focus especially on people who I have the thought “if I were in college one more semester, we could become good friends” about. These are the people with high slopes on the graph, and probably the people who I’ll gain the most by actively trying to stay in contact with. I think I can figure out who these people are also by just thinking who I’m going to be the most sad to leave behind.

Also this maybe goes without saying but if YOU are one of these people for me and you’re thinking something like “I agree with what he’s saying and I hope we don’t lose touch but maybe he doesn’t actually mean it and if I DM him about it he’s going to laugh at me for taking it seriously,” I promise that is not correct and I will be very happy if you do message me about it. And starting in August, I’ll be in NYC, if any of you happen to be visiting there.

I’ve also thought a little bit about what 25-year-old me (which seems way too old to be less than 3 years away, but anyways) will think of this. Is this all wasted effort? Am I just being overly nostalgic because I’m about to graduate, and in a couple years I won’t really care about the “potential friends” that I lost at the end of college? There’s certainly a chance of this happening. But I don’t think it will. As I’ve written about before, I’m going to start getting less opportunities to meet new people very soon. That’s going to make any connections I have now more valuable. Plus, the last time this significant of a shift happened to me was when I graduated from high school, and I very rarely regret reconnecting with people from high school whenever I have the opportunity.

I always feel somewhat unqualified to give life advice, having not gone through a whole lot of life myself. So, if you’re also about to graduate, should you follow everything in here? Not necessarily. Maybe you’re okay with reducing the number of friends you have. Maybe you didn’t really meet a lot of new people recently, and so you don’t have a lot of unsustainable friends anymore. I’m not going to tell you how to live your life. But if you read this and thought it made sense, I think it might be worthwhile to consider doing some of these things. At a basic level, if you lose the structure that brought you together with people, something’s going to need to replace it if you want to keep in touch. You won’t be able to keep everyone around, but you might as well do the best you can. College is over, even if you don’t want it to be, and if nothing changes, anyone below the line of sustainability will gradually fade away.

And if you’re not about to graduate, keep in touch with the people that are. It’s easy to just stick to the people who are still around, especially if your graduating friends are moving away. You’ll be in their situation sooner than you think, though, and when you are, I promise you’ll want your younger friends to stay in touch with you. So pay it forward (or, I guess, backward) and keep in contact with the people who are leaving.

Lastly, I think it’s important to keep in mind that in order to even have potential friends, you need to have had some fun experiences with other people. So even for the people who I’ll never see again, whoever they are, I don’t think I wasted my time with them just because our friendship was short-lived. I’m grateful for all the fun I had. For the worst part of graduating to be losing something, that thing had to be pretty good in the first place. It’d be crazy to avoid making friends because you’re worried about losing them, and I’m confident I would regret that a lot more. The worst part of graduation might be losing potential friends, but making them was one of the best parts of college.