Elementary school is an easy, picture-perfect friendship. It was easy to go up to someone, ask ‘do you wanna play catch?’ and then become best friends forever. If only friendships were still that simple.
Many students are often surrounded by friends– but the harsh reality of loneliness floods underneath the struggle of trying to feel connected to others. Friendships can be one of the most challenging things in high school. The common struggle for many teenagers is keeping and maintaining those friendships as a whole. Not everyone struggles in the same way.
There are many different points in time during high school where friendships thrive, while other times, there is a lack of belonging or connection that someone might long for. It is important to understand it from different perspectives. Everyone has different types of friendships, whether it is a few close friends or a whole group of people they might know from a sport or other extracurricular. These groups of people can be considered as “cliques.”
“(It is) very difficult if you aren’t a part of those groups to make friends because you’re not spending that time with people, or you can’t connect to them through that,” Riley Johnson, a senior at GBHS, said.
At other times, it might be hard to strengthen any type of friendship you have if there is peer pressure involved. The weight of those expectations can affect the mental well being of a student.
“I think peer pressure affects friendships (because sometimes) you’re friends with some people, and then (you realize) ‘Oh, don’t be friends with them,’” Tessa Gardin, a sophomore at GBHS, said.
When someone is telling a person to do one thing but then another tells them to do something else, it only makes it more difficult for the person being told those things.
“If I had friends peer pressure me to break standards or boundaries or just to do things I don’t want to do…I would pull away from that friend group or that friendship,” Johnson said about her own experience of being peer pressured.
Healthy relationships are supposed to be two sided. If one person is putting in all the effort while the other is not, it is hard to keep that friendship going. Communication is a huge part of those relationships.
“A healthy friendship is more respectful and communicative,” Johnson said. “I feel like, if I can communicate my honest feelings with you and even talk to you about behavior that I don’t like, I feel like that’s a big indicator of a healthy friendship.”
That is why trying to create friendships in teenage years can be overly complicated when compared to elementary school relationships. One is harder and more effort has to be put in to maintain the friendship, and the other is simpler with less complications because of how young someone is.
“We all want to hang out with people who have similar interests to us, and so maybe that can sometimes prevent people from… going out and…making friends with people who aren’t exactly like you or…don’t do the same things as you,”Zoey Wheeler, a sophomore at GBHS, said.
Most students miss out on the opportunity because they might assume that one person might not have the same interests as them or are too different from them. They will never know if they do not attempt to reach out and make that connection. They are scared to make the connection with that person.
Trying to talk to friends over text or call is another way of connecting with people instead of one on one in person, but there is a lack of connection because of the phone.
“On screens or like over text, it can be difficult to read emotions and context clues and stuff …to maintain real strong relationships,” Wheeler said.
Social media is a possible factor to the difficulties of friendships nowadays. Since everyone is on the internet, watching and searching for what they want, those expectations of perfection might make that person feel like they need to change themselves.
“I think it’s harder to form real friends because there’s so much stigma around social media and being perfect and just trying to be that aesthetic, most amazing person on there, and your friends might not see you as their real person,” Gardin said.
There are so many expectations and pressures in high school. And on top of that, dealing with friendships that can be harder than they have to be because of the immaturity of others. Even more so, trying to find the people who are for you is the most important thing to look for.
“(Do) not change yourself, because…I’ve seen so many times, especially in high school, people think that they need to change themselves and become something different in order to make friends,” Wheeler said, “But that’s simply not true, because at some point through your life, you’re gonna find people who like (you) and who like you for you.”
