Communication, Communication, Communication

Maintaining and building friendships after high school graduation.

Stay in touch.
This is the first and most important thing you must do in order to maintain your high school friendships. When you were in school staying in touch was easy because you saw each other every day. Now that you are out of school this will no longer happen and keeping up with your friends will require work. You will have to make phone calls, send emails, IM, text and in some cases snail mail your friends in order to stay in touch. Now you may be thinking “big deal, I call all my friends every day anyway”, but after high school the daily phone calls can taper off or stop altogether. Since you are no longer in school together some friends find that they have little to talk about on a daily basis. Think about it, if your at state college and your friend has a full time job the two of you are no longer interacting with the same people, you are no longer having the same day to day experiences, and as a result you won’t have the same depth of conversations about your lives. Your conversations will start to seem more like newsy updates than heart-to-hearts and this can take a toll on some friendships. Frankly, the more superficial types of friendships rarely survive this change in pace. So the first thing you need to realize is that you will need to work to stay in touch and that some of the friendships you think are deep will show themselves to be routed in shared experiences rather than a real bond. As the demands on your time increase and you make new friends in your new life you will have to make an important and somewhat difficult choice… which leads us to another step, cleaning house.

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