Why The Girls You Meet Abroad Are The Best Friends You’ll Ever Have

 

My mom has always told me that the girls you meet in college are the closest friends you’ll ever have. She’s absolutely right, as there is probably no other time in your life that you can dedicate so much time and energy into building female relationships. You’re practically living on top of your college girlfriends, getting to know their favourite TV show to binge, their bedtimes, their every flaw. Your college friends become your family away from home, always there to lend you a new colour of nail polish, bring you coffee in bed, and offer a shoulder to cry on.

 

However, I am going to take my mom’s nugget of wisdom one step farther, and claim that the best friends you’ll ever have are the friends you meet while studying abroad. Spending the semester in Edinburgh, Scotland, I was obviously nervous about venturing to an entirely new country where I knew no one, but I also was not half as nervous as I was when I was going to college for the first time. I was mostly dead set on resisting the awkwardness I felt my entire first month of freshmen year. I am referring to the awkwardness that stems from underlying fears and insecurities that every freshman is attempting to cover up by laughing too hard and being overly friendly to everyone she meets. It took me too long to make my true best friends in college, and I still lament wasting of some of my precious four years of college in a place where I didn’t feel completely comfortable. Going abroad, I felt I was too old and self-possessed for the inauthentic relationships I embarked on during my first months of college and vowed to myself that I was going to hang out with people that I truly and honestly connected with.

 

Of course, I met about a hundred amazing girls in the airport who were studying on my program, and every anxiety I felt about making friends disappeared on my first day in the UK. To be honest, I was not expecting the people I met abroad to be my absolute best friends in my life, as these friendships have an expiration date. I mostly expected to casually have a good time with a few cool people with whom I could travel or go to the grocery store. But, as we settled into our new lives in the most amazing city in Europe, I started to realize that maybe I should not have been so quick to dismiss the legitimacy of the relationships I was going to make abroad, but should, in fact, look to my new friends as people that I can truly trust and depend on.

 

Being abroad fosters the intensity of such friendships because, like college, you are literally spending an inordinate amount of time with your girlfriends. However, unlike at Bates, when there is a lot more time spent in an isolated cubicle on the third floor of the library, the lighter course load abroad allows for even more time to dedicate to friendships. There is way more time in my Edinburgh schedule to spend hanging out in a coffee shop or exploring a new street, museum, or pub with friends.  Attempting to navigate a new city and living completely on my own in an alien place, having girls in the same situation as I was absolutely vital to my initial survival and happiness. Furthermore, traveling to other countries in Europe also allows for my friends and I to literally live on top of one another, as we share bunk beds in hostels, staying up half the night talking and laughing in the dark. 

 

But mostly, the friendships I’ve made abroad have been so successful is due to the fact that I am having so much fun with the girls I’ve met. There have been days in Edinburgh where my friends and I walk around our city with tears in our eyes from laughing so hard about some silly thing one of us has said, but also a more sentimental reason for the tears stemming from the feeling of wonder that we all share for getting the opportunity to live in a place this beautiful. Or there was the night in Copenhagen where we stayed up until 4 AM making friends with local boys. Or there was the day in Madrid when we sat on a park bench contentedly curled up in the sun for the entire day instead of doing more exhausting sightseeing. Or there was the Northern Lights tour in Iceland that we knew was absolutely incredible to experience, but the whole time we couldn’t resist complaining that we’ve never been so cold in our lives. The list goes on and on. 

 

The fact that I just met these girls and the fact that soon we will all have to go our separate ways did not prevent them from becoming some of the closest friends I’ve ever had. We may have only been together for three months, but we share more memories and laughs than a lot of people share in a whole lifetime. (Cheesiness aside.) More importantly, they’ve been the ones by my side as I’ve grown more and more into my own adult.