Friends By Default

Remember those friends that you were friends with during grade school, on through junior high, and then graduated high school with? You were convinced that they understood you the best because they had been through everything with you - the crush you had on the hot guy in class, the concert in which you cried your eyes out, the awful teachers you suffered through together. No one could compare to that hometown friend who had been through thick and thin of your high school career, right? Even though you were going to separate colleges, that friend is the one you knew to call at 3 a.m. to get you through a sticky situation. You knew you had an inseparable bond. ...But what about those who get over that nostalgic feeling of "you were always there for me in the past" and decide to renovate the friends in their current career/life/situation?

Once heading off to college, I actually assumed that I would speak to five people from high school. Not because I wanted to avoid the people I graduated with, but more because I figured they would not apply to my life anymore. Boy, was I wrong about that assumption. My hometown friends have kept in touch with me for the most part through my college years - Friends I, for sure, would lose touch with now are some of my best of friends.

Though I had this lucky experience, a friend and I were discussing the idea of being a "friend by default," which in other words means "Our families both decided to raise us in this city. We took all the same classes, knew the same circle of friends, and we even hung out on the weekends together." -- That is the staple to most "best friend forever" scenarios in high school, but was that friendship meant to be? Are we only hanging out with these people because they were around, or because they actually completed us? Or perhaps they completed us at the time, during the high school years, but now that light has faded as you no longer live in the same city, nor take the same classes together, nor hang out together on the weekends.

As the holidays are upon us, we (for the most part) are gathering back in our hometowns to see those old buddies from high school. We'll reminisce on good times together, laughing at the moments that made us cry, which now have become such petty memories. Although this overbearing sense of gathering around and telling tales of the past will hit you, remember that people may have no need to be in your future. Just because friends were "total BFFs" in high school does not mean that you need to see each other at every break.

After graduating from college, most of the other college students you have will perhaps become "friends by default" because you had one thing in common (location). Those friends from high school will become even deeper "friends by default" because you will no longer have a reason to come home (nor the funds to get there).

Are you a friend by default? Remember that if you have to "catch up" with someone's life once seeing them in the supermarket, perhaps there's a reason why you don't already know what's going on in their life. Some of my best friends now were, at one point in my life, friends by default... but some of my best friends then are long gone - because those commonalities no longer exist. There's no shame in that. There's a reason why they did not make it to your future.

Just something to think about. :)