Elastic friendship
A PSA to text your college roommate back.
I nearly sabotaged my roommate’s long run this week by accidentally stealing his AirPods. In my defense, there are five pairs floating around the house at any given time between the three of us and a rotating cast of significant others. It’s a delicate Bluetooth ecosystem. Mistakes were made.
Ian - the roommate in question - is marathon training. Long run day. AirPods were non-negotiable unless he wanted to raw dog reality for two hours. I needed mine for the pump-up playlist in the Uber before I walked into an MBA student event at Vanderbilt. The morning quickly devolved into a Bluetooth scavenger hunt. But once it was sorted, I found myself weirdly sentimental about the whole thing.
At 25, I didn’t know one of these guys. The other was off on a deep solo side quest across the country. My original core group had scattered - new cities, new jobs, new partners. Everyone moved on, and for a while, I assumed that was that. The golden era of friendship: archived. I thought I’d hit my social cap. That anyone new from here on out would be situational - nice enough, not the kind of people I could see without first psyching myself up and pushing through the initial awkward small talk.
But then new people showed up. Old ones came back in new roles. Some moved back to town. And slowly, things re-formed - not exactly the same, but not worse either. I stopped thinking of friendship as something fixed, locked in by some arbitrary cut-off date. It’s more dynamic than that (thank God). More elastic.
Some of the people I care most about live nowhere near me. Boston. DC. New York. Texas. Even across town feels far when everyone’s working weird hours and trying not to burn out. We stay in touch through group chats and phone tag and sending TikToks and reels that would get us sent to HR.
There’s a certain art to maintaining long distance friends in your twenties. Jedidiah Jenkins (an author I keep up with) calls it alligator food. Alligators eat one massive meal - a deer, say - and they coast on those calories for months. Same idea. I see some people I love twice a year, maybe once a month if they live across town, and recharge again to hit the daily slog.
I don’t have a big takeaway here. I know it’s not groundbreaking - just dropping a mid-week note that we’re not done meeting the people who are going to matter to us. More importantly, text your college roommate back that you left on read last week.
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A delicate Bluetooth ecosystem hahaha
Great read