Staying Close With College Friends: How To Maintain Your Friendships After Graduation

College can be an opportunity to form deep, meaningful friendships. However, many people have trouble sustaining those relationships once they leave school. When you’re no longer seeing your friends every day in the classroom, dorm, or dining hall, keeping up your connections may require more work. What can you do to keep your college friends after graduation? 

Maintaining friendships after college often requires deliberate commitment. Regular communication, scheduled visits, and planned group activities may be necessary now that you can no longer bump into each other around campus. It can also be helpful to keep your circle of friends connected with your life by updating them on important changes and introducing them to new friends and family members. These efforts will often be rewarded with deeper, richer relationships.

If mental health challenges make it difficult to maintain friendships, consider reaching out to a licensed therapist for support.

Why college friendships matter

Close friendships can have a positive influence on nearly every aspect of a person’s life, providing benefits like the following:

• Protection from stress: Social support from friends can improve resilience in the face of stress and decrease feelings of loneliness. 
• Academic performance: People with strong friendships may do better in school, so maintaining undergraduate friendships could bode well for a possible graduate school career. 
• Career performance: Having better friends could improve your odds of finding employment as you transition from school to the workforce. 
• Better physical health: By providing a buffer against stress and offering social support, friendships that grow in strength over time could benefit your overall health.
• Better mental health: Satisfying friendships seem to lead to stronger psychological well-being in adulthood. 
• Greater happiness: In addition to all of the practical benefits described above, meaningful friendships can enhance your overall life satisfaction. 

While these benefits may apply to friendships from any point in life, many people find that it’s easier to form close bonds during their college days than at most other stages. 

During the four years or so that you spend at school, you may meet huge numbers of new people who are living and working in the same small area. You and your fellow students will usually be learning new things and thinking deeply about your beliefs, identities, and aspirations. This combination of personal growth, close contact with others, and increased freedom can help strong friendships develop naturally.

Why it can be hard to stay close to college friends

Because college friendships are often so intense and meaningful, it can be hard to believe that they could ever drift apart. However, many people find their connections fading soon after they leave campus. Here are a few common reasons people may have trouble staying in touch with the friends they met in college.

Newfound distance

Although some people may choose to live and work in the area where they went to school, many don’t, so you and your college friends could wind up living far apart. It may be harder to stay emotionally close when you’re no longer seeing each other every day. 

Life changes

While you’re at school with your friends, you may automatically have many things in common with them, such as campus life, the stress of exams, and preparations for life after graduation. As your post-college lives evolve and change, you may find that you have fewer shared experiences over which to bond. After a few years go by, you might be a very different person than you were in school, potentially shifting the dynamic between you and your friends. 

Time constraints

The number of demands on your time tends to grow after college. You may take on increased work responsibilities, form committed romantic relationships, have children, or get more involved in your local community, to name just a few. The more packed your schedule gets, the more difficult it can be to schedule time to spend with friends, or even to reach out and stay in touch. 

What you can do to remain close with college friends

Staying connected with the friends you make at school may require some deliberate effort. Here are a few approaches that may help. 

Schedule time together

Many adults fall into the habit of telling their friends, “We should hang out sometime!” but never following through. Without a specific plan in place, the routines and responsibilities of daily life can wind up taking precedence by default.

Scheduling specific times for interacting with friends can create a sense of commitment that should make follow-through more likely. You can start by simply budgeting time each week to reach out to one of your college friends by phone (which can maintain a stronger sense of connection than communicating by text). From there, you can set times for in-person visits and shared activities. It’s often helpful to take a moment after each get-together to put the next one on the calendar. 

Create traditions

In addition to scheduling one-off visits, you and your friend group can try to establish recurring events at which you get together, catch up, and reminisce about old times. This could be as simple as an annual dinner party that serves as a “mini-reunion.” Alternatively, you could center this get-together around an activity you enjoyed while in school, such as camping, attending a sporting event, or seeing a live concert.

Digital “hangouts” can also help you maintain your connection, even if they may not completely replace in-person interactions. A weekly or monthly video chat with your college friends could contribute significantly to your continued sense of togetherness. You can also participate in shared digital activities, like playing remote online games or watching movies or TV shows “together.”

Share your happiness

It may also be important to respond appropriately when your friends do the same for you. Giving sincere and enthusiastic congratulations for their positive news can reinforce their desire to connect.

Keep communication channels open

Having an ongoing “conversation” with your college friends could go a long way toward continuing to sense you are present in each other’s lives. This can take many different forms, including the following:

Group chats

Modern communication technologies have spawned countless platforms for remote interaction. You may want to try starting a group chat within the first few months after graduation, when your sense of closeness is still strong.

Writing letters or emails

Supplementing your chat interactions with longer-form written content, like letters or emails, can enable a richer exchange of news and thoughts than short texts allow. You could even try sending “newsletters” updating your friend circle about events in your lives. 

Gift exchanges

Taking turns sending small and thoughtful gifts to each other is another way you and your friends could maintain a sense of ongoing intimacy. This can become a form of communication all by itself. For example, sending souvenirs from your travels or mementos of significant events could be a way to keep friends informed about what you’ve been up to. 

Include your old friends in your new life

Though college can be a fertile time for friendships, most people continue forming new connections even after leaving school. You may want to make an effort to introduce your new friends to your old ones — if they hit it off, your past and present social circles may be woven together. 

Similarly, if you wind up finding a spouse or life partner, you can try to create opportunities for them to befriend your college friends. If you and your former classmates have children, arranging playdates between them might allow your friendship to carry over to the next generation.

Take advantage of resources for former students

When you’re looking to remain in touch with the people you knew in college, your school itself may be a valuable source of help — many academic institutions provide a variety of resources to help alumni network and communicate. For instance, you might join alumni associations, class reunions, and virtual alumni communities.

Care for your mental health

Nurturing friendships can support your psychological well-being, but the reverse can also be true. Conditions like depression and anxiety often lead to social isolation by decreasing your motivation to connect with others. It may be easier to remain close to your peer group from college if you prioritize your mental health by talking with a therapist. 

If a full schedule is contributing to your difficulties with maintaining post-college friendships, you may be uncertain about whether you can fit in therapy as well. Many people in this situation find online therapy a helpful option. Talking with a mental health professional remotely often allows for more flexibility in scheduling. 

Evidence from clinical trials increasingly suggests that internet-delivered therapy can be effective at treating conditions like social anxiety that can interfere with interpersonal connections.