people change, and friendships can blossom and fade pretty quickly. keeping a friendship going takes hard work and you have to be (wait for iiiiitttttt) intentional. (you knew that word was coming, right?)
two of my best friends from high school graduated with me from arcadia university, and we've worked together for two summers now. but that's not why we've stayed friends all through high school and college.
us at my wedding! june 2012
1. we put effort into the friendship.
we make sure to ask how the other is doing, not just so we can quickly ramble about our own most recent problems. when i was away at gordon college, jackie (twin on the right) and i skyped and made sure to catch each other up on each others' lives.
2. we spend time together.
we've been lucky enough to still be in the same area, and we make sure to go get froyo together, cook dinner together, and sit on a couch and complain/talk about how our senior thesis projects are going. (i can remember multiple times that i came over in running shorts and a pinny and just laid on their couch for hours, talking about boys and school frustrations.)
3. we were dorky then, and not much has changed.
// freshman year (?) of high school pool party
4. we still value similar things.
hard work, kindness, and laughing are still high on our list of important things. in high school, hard work meant taking AP classes and doing alllllll the homework, but now, it means not slacking off at our summer job.
5. we have lived in the same area, but we didn't always.
i went away to gordon in massachusetts for two years, and christie studied abroad in scotland. it made talking difficult (because we didn't just see each other every day, like during high school, and then there was that time difference thing while christie was away...) but we still made it work! now, christie has moved to ohio--but that's a reason to visit her in a new part of the country! we've been friends for a decade, folks. and distance won't change that.
check out this article on the shelf life of a friendship. my main takeaway: "if a friendship is meaningful, it needs to be nurtured."
thanks for being awesome friends, jackie and christie.
how do you nurture your friendships?
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