Dear Birdie: Long Distance Best Friends

Written by Birdie, Graphic by Anna Porter

Welcome back to “Dear Birdie,” a column where I do my best to offer guidance and some humor in response to questions from our college community! Throughout the column, I hope to help answer questions about anything and everything – from class troubles to relationship advice, movie recommendations and more. This column is anonymous, on both ends, so that you all can be more comfortable (and so I don’t have anyone tracking me down if my advice accidentally makes things worse instead of better). Which we’re going to hope and put out there that it doesn’t!

This week, we’re touching on a topic near and dear to my heart: 

“Dear Birdie, how do you cope with being apart from your best friend while in college? I always want her here but there are some particular little moments when I just really need her and don’t know what to do.” 

Oh my, how I resonate with this one! My lovely best friend of 19 years is back home, and there are so many moments throughout the school year that I wish for nothing more than to have her here in Savannah with me. It’s hard when you both lead busy, separate college lives. It can feel difficult to find a time that works with both of your schedules to sit down and catch up over the phone, especially if you know yourselves and know that every phone call between you and your best friend is at least an hour long. That being said, there are definitely other ways to remedy the physical absence of your best friend. 

Something my best friend and I often do is send random photo dumps of the last week or so – it sparks further conversation into the little details of life that might not have been big enough to warrant a text of their own (What restaurant were you at? Did those two get back together? How did you get so sunburnt?). Plus, you get to put faces to the names of the people you’ve heard in their countless stories, see your best friend’s smiling face, their new makeup look and more. 

Another unique way to keep in touch is to start sending handwritten letters to each other. There is so much character and personality within a letter that it feels like a piece of your best friend is there with you. There’s nothing better than seeing their handwriting on paper, reading the way their thoughts spill out on the page, and seeing what other tiny things they threw in the envelope. I like to include stickers, magazine clippings or other paper ephemera! The best part is that you can hold it physically in your hand and read it again any time you like. A postcard from a trip will do the trick too!

Being apart from your best friend can be a lonely experience. Even if you have a full college life, nobody quite understands you as they do. Hopefully, these tips will help ease the distance as long as you are apart and make your reunion that much sweeter. 

That’s enough chirping from me for now.

Until next time,

Birdie