I just started my freshman year of college across the country. How do you know that your group is your group, not just a group you happen to be a part of?
-- Rowan from Minnesota
Hi Rowan - You can meet your best friends anywhere. I remember in high school, I used to hang out with Janis and Damian. They were great but regrettably, I threw them over to hang out with a pack of the most popular kids in school, led by Regina George. It took me a long time, but I finally realized that the popular kids didn’t care about me as a person, but that Janis and Damian did, and that is the group I wanted to be part of.
Wait, maybe that’s the plot from Mean Girls and not my life. I get confused sometimes, but the point is still valid. A sense of reciprocity, a belief that you can be yourself without having to always put on an act, a sense of shared joy, and reliability and trust are all good indicators of what friendships are all about. If you feel that in your group, whether it is an intentional group or a group of circumstances, I would say that it is worth staying with.
I will confess that there is a certain randomness to it all. In college, I was assigned into a student housing group with three other freshmen. As far as I can tell, the only reason the college put us together is that we were from contiguous states (Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina). Forty years later, two of my roommates are still among the most important people in my life and I am a better person for the weird randomness of the housing policies of Haverford College. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the school had based room assignments on hobbies or sleep patterns or on social media indicators (if it had existed at the time). Maybe it would have been equally great, but the lesson for me has always been that you can find the “right” group in unexpected places, especially if you don’t spend all your time trying to figure out what the right group is.
Sincerely,
Ken