Reconciling Changing Relationships
By Hailey Cernuto
College is such a unique four-year period of our lives, and the amount of people that pass through our lives during that time may seem infinite. From your freshman year roommate to that one upperclassman you became close with through a shared class, it is all too easy to lose touch with people we once spent lots of time with. For the most part, we don’t actually realize how many people we meet, come to know, and cease to know. I think that’s okay, but what hurts is losing someone and realizing after the fact how important they were to you.
The hardest losses to reconcile are the losses that have no clear cause. It’s tough to move forward when you lose someone not because of a fight or distance, but because your relationship just dissolves or changes. I’ve found that my relationships change when people change and grow into themselves as individuals. The most salient example I can think of is how my high school friends have now taken on different roles in my life.
As a sophomore, I think it is reasonable to expect that my high school friends would have remained a significant part of my life. And they are, but not a part of my daily life. While I’m here at Villanova, my five best friends from high school in St. Louis, South Bend, Lexington, Dallas, and Colorado Springs. Truthfully, I rarely talk to them beyond the perpetual attempts to keep a Snap streak, but they are what makes going home so great. It makes me so happy to see who my five best friends have become, but it also makes me wonder what brought us so close just three or four years ago. Today, I can’t think of one similarity between all six of us other than where we attended high school. Now, instead of being my go-to’s for everything under the sun, my high school friends are a source of nostalgia, excitement, and comfort for when I’m home.
What’s hard for me to grasp is what happened with the people that I have both met and lost at Villanova. You would think that people living on the same campus, taking some of the same classes, and knowing a lot of the same people would be in relatively similar places. The truth is, no one ever really stays in the same place. With every semester, schedules change, beliefs change, goals change, and friend groups evolve, dissolve, and grow. It can be hard to sustain certain relationships with the constantly moving pieces in everyone’s lives. That said, I’ve come to recognize that it is so important to know who means the most to you, who plays the greatest roles, and who most positively affects your life. Knowing who these people are can alter the way you carry yourself and interact with others in the best way possible. When you are fully aware of the relationships you value the most, it is easier to sustain them by conducting yourself with compassion, patience, understanding, and selflessness. But losses do still happen, and the most critical part of a loss is how you either fight to regain what you’ve lost, or how you pick yourself up and move on.
