I used to think I’d know exactly when it would happen.
I’d walk into my first class, or grab a seat in some common area between classes, and someone would say something, we’d laugh at the same dumb thing, and that would be it — the start of a friendship I’d have for the next four years.
At least that’s how it always goes on TV. Two strangers end up in the same dorm or bump into each other getting lunch, and by the end of the next episode they’re already inseparable.
It honestly makes for good television, and it’s the version of college most of us had in our heads before we even got here: that friendship just happened to you fast, the moment you showed up.
So I kept waiting for my version of that scene. It didn’t come for the first week of classes, or the second.
Reality moves a lot slower. I’m a commuter, so I don’t have the built-in set a dorm hallway supposedly gives you. No roommate, no floor group chats and nobody a wall away.
Most of my afternoons end with me at Scooter’s, laptop open, half doing homework, just existing on campus between classes or before heading to work. It’s fine; it’s also nothing like the shows.
I blame my lack of socializing on my unsociable schedule. Others, mostly on Fizz, blamed their lack of friends on their summer of isolation before entering college. It seems that first-years all hold this unanimous feeling that we have to find the right group now or the next four years are cooked.
Then, to my surprise, I found the language for this universal feeling in my philosophy class, of all the places. We were just a few minutes into class, and I was half-listening the way you do in an 8 a.m. lecture, when my professor mentioned Aristotle’s theory of friendships.
I froze mid-note-taking because it explained too precisely the gap between the friendships I already had and the ones I was missing.
Aristotle argued that friendships generally fall into three categories: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure and friendships of virtue.
Most of what passes for “making friends” in the first few weeks of college barely qualifies as the first two, let alone the last. This is when I realized the movies skip right to the third, because they never show how these virtuous friendships are built.
I’ve come to terms with how real friendships in college aren’t something that happens to you in week one, no matter how hard you try. Rather, it’s something you build, slowly and usually without realizing you’re doing it.
Aristotle breaks it down like this:
1) A friendship of utility is where you’re each getting something out of it; think of it like the person you always partner with in group projects because you both want the A.
2) A friendship of pleasure is built on having fun together; you both like the same shows and music and have the same humor.
Both are real, both are fine! But Aristotle then points out that neither one tends to survive past the situation that made it useful or fun in the first place. The group project always ends, the interests change and, eventually, so does the friendship.
Then Aristotle describes a final type of friendship: a friendship of virtue. This is the kind of friendship built between people who genuinely wish good things for each other, not because of what the other person can do for them or how entertaining they are, but because of who they are.
That’s the kind of friendship that sticks. And it’s notably also the kind that takes the longest to build because you can’t actually rush getting to know someone.
I’ve come to realize that’s the part the shows tend to leave out. The TV version compresses the “wishing well for each other” part into a single first-week montage, as if a friend of virtue is something that you find if you sit at the right lunch table.
But if Aristotle’s right, then that’s backwards. The friend group doesn’t come first and the closeness second. Making genuine friends in college doesn’t come easily or naturally, and it isn’t supposed to. That crave we hold for true friendships is built through consistent effort, not luck.
Aristotle, in “Nicomachean Ethics,” says that to know a friend you must gain experience of them and “become familiar with him, and that is very hard.” You cannot get to true friends without first putting yourself in rooms with the same people repeatedly.
Friendship of virtue is not given — it’s built by showing up, being patient with the slow process and putting in effort.
Don’t give up on finding your people.
Iman Mohamed can be reached at moha5348@stthomas.edu.
Madelyn Gallagher can be reached at gall6444@stthomas.edu.
