College Crisis: When Friendships Dwindle

When you’re in college, you expect to make a tight group of friends. There’s probably a funny story of how you all met, you’ll do everything together, and you might even be able to visit each other during the summer. You become so close in such a short amount of time and you might even start living together.

But what happens when it all falls apart?

I met my best friend, Krista* during the first week of our freshman year. Our group of friends started out huge, and it slowly dwindled down, but Krista and I remained super close. We even moved in together the second semester, and lived in an apartment our sophomore year.

We did everything together – football games, going out to eat and even taking the same gen eds. We never got in a fight, and if she ever got angry with me for something she never told me.

You can imagine my surprise when she said her parents didn’t want her to live with me for our junior and senior years.

After some pitiful excuse about how I probably wouldn’t get along with her friend who was coming up, I let it slide and we hardly mentioned it. We remained good friends, but it seemed like Krista was distancing herself from me. She and her boyfriend had been fighting and she was always homesick, so I attributed it to that.

Then the sub-tweeting started. I didn’t want to think her tweets were about me, but it got to the point where other people started to notice and ask if we were fighting. My parents constantly told me that I was putting more effort into our friendship, but I defended her. I stood by her side and said that there was no way that was what was happening.

Fast-forward to today: it’s five weeks into the new semester and I ran into her once, at our apartment complex no less. I’ve tried texting her, asking her if she wants to go to the games, but I just got some excuse. I get that she’s busy and I’m busy too – but I can find time to go to lunch with someone on the weekends.

At this point, I’ve taken a giant step back. I’ve talked it out with my other friends, and they all agree that I’ve done the best that I could do. Communication is a two-way street, and I did my part.

While I do miss my best friend, our friendship did become more one-sided towards the end. Krista isn’t a bad person; I guess we just weren’t meant to be friends. At this point, I’ve done all I can do to fix our friendship. That being said, I’m not going to let her, or anybody else, walk over me anymore – if she wants to come back in my life, she’ll have to earn it.