Maintaining friendships across distance, deadlines, and different lives

In school, friendships often grow from sharing the same environment: the same coursework, teachers, exams, and everyday struggles. After high school, friends often end up in different departments, universities, cities, and even countries. The common ground you and your friends once shared disappears, and staying close requires deliberate effort.

Nusrat Jahan Alve, 22, found this out first-hand as the only one in her tight-knit childhood friend group to move abroad for higher education. While her friends remained in familiar surroundings in the country, Nusrat had to adjust to a foreign environment and take on new responsibilities, juggling classes with part-time jobs.

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“We used to sit next to each other every day at school and even attended the same coaching classes,” Nusrat shares. “We walked home together and knew everything that was happening in each other’s lives. Now, even being online at the same time seems to be very difficult.”

Moving to a new city even within the same country introduces its own challenges. Tasnim Rodoshi Hassan, 22, moved to Khulna to attend her university, leaving behind her friends in Dhaka. “If we were all in the same city, maybe we could meet up on weekends,” Tasnim says. “Even most of our breaks don’t match. I’ll come home expecting that we can meet and then find out that my friends’ classes are still going on. So, we usually have to wait for an Eid to see each other, and there are only so many Eids in a year.”

Tasnim adds that living arrangements can also create a gap between friends: “Most of my friends still live at home, but I live in a hall, and there’s really no explaining that to them – neither the hassle nor the fun of it. They won’t get how it feels to be away from your parents or to have a room full of people around you all the time.”

Of course, being geographically close does not necessarily mean being available to each other. Farha Fauzia, 23, lives less than 30 minutes away from some of her closest friends. “You would think meeting up would be easy, but it really isn’t,” Farha shares. “Our academic calendars are completely out of sync. When my semester finals wrap up, and I finally have some time to breathe, theirs are about to start, or vice versa. We’ve made plans many times and then had to postpone them later.”

What’s worse is that sometimes, even sharing a campus doesn’t guarantee regular interactions with your old friends.

“Our routines still don’t line up, even though we’re at the same university,” Jarine Tasnim Ava, 20, says. “Different majors, or even just different sections within the same major, mean classes happen in different places at different times. One of us might have classes from 8 AM to 1 PM, and the other from 2:30 PM to 5 PM, so, most days, we don’t even run into each other on campus.”

Farha believes that the disconnect comes down to more than just scheduling: “When I tell my friends a story, I have to add so much context for them to get it. When I want to rant about a faculty member or complain about a course, it’s hard to make them understand, especially if they’re in a completely unrelated major.”

“I think being in the same major at different universities is easier to relate to than being at the same university but studying completely different things,” Farha adds.

Old friendships are constantly tested by everything from scheduling conflicts to fading common ground. Yet, most people still find ways to hold on.

For Jarine, that means making use of short windows of free time. “We usually meet in the evening because that’s when everyone has the best chance of being free,” she reveals. “We just get food and sit somewhere for a couple of hours to talk. If we keep waiting for the day when everyone is completely free, we probably won’t get to meet at all.”

Meanwhile, Nusrat feels that small updates help compensate for the lack of everyday interaction: “We send each other random memes and voice messages during the day. Sometimes, I’ll send something that happened in class just because I know they would have laughed at it if they were there.”

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On surviving long distance friendships

Tasnim, on the other hand, has come up with alternative ways of staying connected across the distance. “We started watching the same shows on our own time and texting about them afterwards. It gives us something to talk about that isn’t just academics.”

Then there’s Farha, who, alongside her friends, has built a system for the exam season: “We let each other know in advance whose exams are coming up. That way, if someone doesn’t see a text, leaves it on seen for a week, doesn’t pick up a call, or forgets to call back, we already know why. And because we’ve given each other that heads-up, we try not to call or send long texts when we know the other person is in the middle of exams, if we can help it.”

“We no longer feel slighted when someone cancels,” Farha continues. “There was a time when we would think, 'They don’t want to meet us anymore.' Now, we understand that everyone is just busy. We reschedule and move on. We used to spend a long time apologising for replying late or cancelling plans because of exam stress. Now, the agreement is simple: we trust that we care about each other, even when we go silent for weeks at a time.”

As academics and life, in general, pull people into separate orbits, the definition of staying close to one’s friends also changes. It goes from regular meetups and long over-the-phone conversations to using whatever time you have to check in and show up when you can. Does it take more effort? Yes. But is it worth it? Absolutely!