When you are in a place like college, where people are constantly changing and schedules are always unpredictably busy, it can be challenging to find the time to meet a group of friends that make you feel like you belong.
Many college students also meet one group of friends early on in their college experience and stick with them because they simply feel like it is easy, not because they want to. For many people in their lives, the thought of reaching out and trying to make new friends every day sounds like an incredibly difficult task to follow through with.
College students will sit next to someone all semester and barely speak more than a couple of words to them when that person could have been their future best friend, for all they could have known. Sparking up the smallest of conversations can lead to relationships that can last for ages.
Many college students also tend to fall into the routine of doing everything by themselves and never bothering to try and talk to anybody new at all. They will go to their classes without speaking a word more than they are required to, then go to the gym and do the same, and so on and so on.
Some people enjoy living this way more than having many friends, but, for a lot of these people, they have just been doing it for so long that they do not know how to get out of the cycle.
It can be nearly impossible to break out of their antisocial shell and start to talk with the strangers that they see for weeks on end but never bother starting a conversation with.
Once it’s finally broken, it will be revealed pretty quickly that people can be kind and interested in what you have to say and they might even agree and want to get to know you even better.
Essentially, you never know which people in the room share the same beliefs and ideas of fun that you have until you start to get to know them.
It is all up to the effort of each individual person on how many friends they would like to have in their life. The more quality friends that you have, the more helpful people you have to fall back on when you are in a stressful state.
Despite the positives that reaching out and talking to new people can bring, it is still far easier said than done. Some people just have too much anxiety or are just too nervous to talk to new people because of fear of rejection or being disliked.
For these people, it is better to just stay to themselves, rather than to just try and at least see if they will be disliked or rejected.
When you see these people in your classes, at the gym, or eating at the Dining Commons alone, it is the outgoing person’s job to invite them over or just spark up a short conversation. It could go a long way for that quiet student and make them realize that everyone has a friend out there, they just have to find them.
DISCLAIMER: This article is the sole opinion of William Pruett
William Pruett can be contacted atwpruett@kscequinox.com
