Writing: Practice Making Friends

“There is no replacement for the bonds we build in person. For the potlucks and parties. For the worlds we construct together, even if they only last the night.” —Molly Crabapple, “Temporary Utopia”

Your Assignment

I want you to tell me a story about when a stranger became a friend, or a friend became your best friend. It can be a single instance in exquisite detail or, better yet, a montage of moments that form a replicable pattern. Because the goal of this exercise is for you to observe an abstracted form of your friendship and realize you can make more of them, and you can do so intentionally.

Daunting assignment? Then you should definitely keep reading.

Loneliness Likely

Less than half of college students are self-reporting being rarely or never lonely, with more of those socially satisfied people being older and cisgender (Cornett, 2026; Hill et al, 2026); the rest of you will be facing elevated risk of loneliness—that correlates to likely major depressive and generalized anxiety disorders—as you move to an exciting new home full of strangers. Colleges can recognize that “[a]ddressing loneliness presents a powerful opportunity for institutions to improve student retention and graduation rates” (Cornett, 2026, p. 3), but not be well-positioned or resourced to address the shifting needs of your generation.

By thinking about your process of friendship, you can help your college mitigate student loneliness. That is valuable to them.

Cultivating Friendships

In advocating for peer support communities at Texas Christian University, LaConte (2023) asserts* that ✨healthy friendships are formed from: proximity with social safety over time featuring repeated interactions leading to positive outcomes and equitable return of effort.✨ The typical welcome-to-college cohort bonding experience fails to both facilitate repeated interactions and to create positive outcomes for the students, but is expected to make the facilitators—who worked hard to bring it to fruition—the closest of friends by the time it is done. The bewildered college students, however, are just as likely to wander off and text their high school friends—now in another time zone—to compare the oddities of institutional rituals.

⚠️This is a trap:⚠️ the first element of friendship is proximity and your high school friends are not there with you. While allocating your time to keep up with them on social media is not the only way to be lonely, it does correlate with loneliness (Hill et al, 2026). You need to focus on spending time with the people who are close to you now and figuring out which of them are going to be your new friends.

Establishing Trustworthiness

For me, this starts with evaluating trustworthiness as a gauge of social safety. Like many normal people, if I do not trust somebody then I will minimize the amount of time I am in their proximity: this prevents a friendship from forming, but also mitigates the risk I perceive they pose to me and my well-being. Feltman (2024) suggests that ✨trustworthiness can be condensed to “four distinct assessments about how someone is likely to act[:] care, sincerity, reliability, and competence.”✨ Matters of competence, reliability, and sincerity are fairly straightforward, but it is worth defining care. “Care is the assessment that you have the other person’s interests in mind as well as your own when you make decisions and take actions. Of the four assessments of trustworthiness, care is in some ways the most important for building lasting trust” (Feltman, 2024, p. 16).

Looking at how Feltman defines care another way, we see that our assessment that somebody cares is what causes us to believe (or to trust) that our interactions with them will lead to positive outcomes and equitable return of effort which is the other half—after prolonged relaxed proximity—of how a friendship forms. From this you can extrapolate a strategy: introduce yourself in a way that suggests trustworthiness (with indicators of care, sincerity, and competence—reliability comes over time) and then follow up with the invitation to repeated interactions leading to positive outcomes and equitable return of effort.

The intentional repeated interactions form what Bhai calls an “anchor” (2025) on Harvard’s Making Caring Common project. Bhai does not dwell on this point, but the psychological effect of an anchor is to give you a position that you hope (forward looking) will be meaningful or retrospectively (looking back) draw meaning out of. The metaphor of the anchor indicates how shared engagement in meaning-making behaviors holds people together and keeps them from drifting off and, for our purposes, lowering a college’s student retention and graduation rates. Your college will care about this.

Note that you do not have to be the absolute leader here, but you do need to be looking for opportunities that are a strong match for you and making space to create those opportunities if they do not yet exist. This is easier if you are plotting out options when touring campuses.

A Hypothetical Example

For example, and to borrow from my current life, I bake cookies for my friends. I signal the level of care I put into the cookies by proactively explaining that they are “gluten and dairy free, but contain eggs and nuts” for people who might ordinarily forego them due to unspoken allergy-related doubts. So when I tour a dorm, I am going to be looking at the kitchen and visualizing my cookie-baking routine in there—and checking for what I need to bring versus what is supplied in terms of mixing bowls et cetera. And as quickly as possible after the autumn move-in, I (ideally with the assistance of my roommate) will get to the kitchen and bake those easily-shared cookies that put a very warm and welcoming smell in the hall.

While sharing the cookies, I would be scouting for other tabletop role-players. The campus tour should have given an indication if there is already a club for such activities, as well as provided an opportunity to scout for suitable, routinely schedule-able rooms for this “repeated interactions” space. Again, you do not need to be the person trying to start this if you find somebody else is recruiting for a table, but you do need to take the initiative to get a seat at their table before they have filled them all.

The pre-college preparation for this would include learning to bake cookies (easy) and learning a tabletop role-playing game (ask around a local gaming shop if you need leads) supported by learning the basic technical skills for setting up a Discord server for between-session engagement and/or a campaign journal, like on LoreKeeper.

Of course, the particulars of how you find or create space for a community that meets your social needs while offering participants equitable returns on their efforts is up to you. The important thing is that you feel empowered to take the initiative of making your college feel like welcoming space for yourself and people like you, even/especially if your college’s default efforts came up short.

Some Real Results

Should you think this will have a positive outcome? LaConte (2023) reports that with a 70% response rate from players in 5 university-sponsored D&D games, 40% of them were not engaged with any other university-sponsored activities and, more importantly, 70% of them said their involvement in the social activity influenced their decision to continue at TCU. TCU has a delightfully low attrition rate (7%) and including role playing games in their Comprehensive Collaborative Care Model had a measurable contribution to that key metric. Being able to tell that story is how they get the university to sponsor those games, and now you have an idea about how to tell such a story of your own.

Building utopias wherein friendships can grow and flourish is a skill. Do not sell your ability to create utopias short just because they are temporary.

References

Bhai, K. (2025, June 26). “Creating Anchors for Your Teen’s Mental Health.” Making Caring Common Project, Harvard Graduate School of Education. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/whats-new/creating-anchors-for-your-teens-mental-health via https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu

Crabapple, M. (2025, March 9). “Temporary Utopia.” https://mollycrabapple.substack.com/p/temporary-utopia

Feltman, C. (2024). The thin book of trust: An essential primer for building trust at work (Third edition). Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

LaConte, J. (2023). “Helping nerdy students build community with tabletop role playing games.” Geek Therapeutics. https://academy.geektherapeutics.com/course/helping-nerdy-students-build-community-2-hour-ce/

Hill, M. J., King, K. A., Vidourek, R. A., Smith, M. L., & Merianos, A. L. (2026). Exploration of excessive social media use with loneliness among U.S. College students. Journal of American College Health, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2025.2573108

Seyfarth, R. M., Cheney, D. L. (2012) The evolutionary origins of friendship. Annual review of psychology, 63, 153-177.

*  LaConte cites Seyfarth and Cheney (2012) for these elements but I think the citation a stretch.