It'll start slowly. School breaks will come and go quickly, as will an increasing amount of the personal connections with people from home. After Senior year of High School, college students are relatively excited to get out and expand their social horizons. As time goes on, though, the bonds of high school friendships are broken and altered.

Is this bad? Is this good?

Frankly, it's not good or bad, but rather it is relative to every person's individual experiences. If you had many solid friends and acquaintances in High School, you would in all likelihood make more of an effort to retain those friendships over the years. However, if High School was "not the place for you," then new friendships made during college are probably more valuable.

The point is that as time goes on, you see less and less of the people who went to your High School. To be sure, there are universities which attract many people from the same area, but for the majority of college students this is simply not the case. Now, as you see less and less of old friends, your care factor for them gradually (or rapidly) decreases.

Do you, then, lose track of peoples' lives without even realizing it? Were these people important to you from the beginning? The answers to these questions are different for everyone and their personal relationships. Nevertheless, there is no why reason why, with minimal effort, you cannot keep up with the lives of old friends. Who knows how old connections may help you in the future. In fact, you might make new friends from home as time goes on (which is always fun.)

This post was originally written by Michael Balkin
University of Michigan · Political Science · 03 Jan 2007