long-distance adult friendships
+ highlights from my Oregon coast road trip 🚗
Since graduating from college, it’s become harder to maintain long-distance adult friendships.
It used to be that you’d regularly see someone in class, at the dining hall, in a club meeting, or in the dorms. Friendships started organically and contextually. Both people were in the right place at the right time during a particularly developmental period of life that was ripe for meeting new people.
These friendships were maintained conveniently with the helping hand of a mandated schedule. Club meetings at 7 PM every Tuesday meant reliably seeing your interest-based friends on a repeated basis. Web application development classes at 11 AM every Tuesday and Thursday cleared your schedule on Mondays and Wednesdays to complete group projects at the library with your class friends for an entire semester.
Sociologists have long considered three conditions crucial to making close friends: proximity, repeated and unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages sharing.
College, it seems, was the perfect incubator for cultivating close friendships.
Nowadays, being thousands of miles away from your friends forces intentionality and a different set of tactics to maintain (and make!) friendships. Built-in schedules to catch up with your friends no longer exist. As an adult you own your own time, which means you have to deliberately make time to invest in your friends.
For your close friends, this can look like a check-in text or FaceTime call. For your best friends, this can look like taking trips to build new memories together or visiting each other in our new hometowns. The hardest part is figuring out who you’d want to continue investing your time and energy into (and how much) and who you’d by okay with loosening the line of connection to make space for the new people you’ll meet.
Last weekend, I took a 4-day trip to Oregon with one of my best friends from college. We share the kind of relationship where seeing each other brings out our quirks that would typically make any average person politely scoot away from us. Our weird comes out, feeds off the other person’s weird, and kicks any and all shame out the door.
It’s been 8 months since our last trip where we spent a few days skiing in Breckenridge, just due for another trip. This year, we opted for something a bit warmer and coastal inspired by our shared guilty pleasure The Summer I Turned Pretty and decided to drive down the Oregon coast.
Here are a few of my favorite moments from the trip:
🌅 Sunset at Cannon Beach
Our quintessential summer vacation moment was when we picnicked with our Safeway haul of beloved American snacks (Oreos may or may not have been involved) at Cannon Beach. We sported our Tevas resilient against the granules of sand and positioned ourselves on flat ground directly in front of the setting sun. We watched couples dressed up in matching white linens and flowery dresses as a professional photographer took their pictures. This commenced a conversation on weddings, rings, and honeymoons and how we’d split the money between them if we had just one pot of money for this. (We both agreed that honeymoon would take the greater share since we believed that marriage was about the love and loyalty of the two people which is best memorialized from their time spent alone.)
🌊 Tidepooling at Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area
We originally made a detour to see the Oregon’s tallest lighthouse but to our delight discovered the area had public tide pools as well. We somehow made it just in time for the public tide pooling. A park ranger managing the area greeted us and provided some rules and guidelines to follow. He handed us a laminated paper with all the tide pool creatures we could find in the area, and we set off on a scavenger hunt to spot as many as we could.
After miraculously rock-hopping without getting splashed by the tides, we were able to check off giant green anemone, ochre sea stars, purple sea urchins, California mussels, and black turban snails from our list. I felt like a kid again experiencing wonder and awe while playing a much more interactive and immersive version of ‘I Spy’.
🥾 Hiking at Samuel H. Boardman Scenic Corridor
On one of our last days, we hiked three trails in the scenic corridor: Secret Beach, Natural Bridges, and Indian Sands. Every trail ended with a stunning viewpoint of one of Oregon’s unique rugged coastlines featuring sea stacks and natural arches. We swooned over everything from the color of the sea to the sheer force of the waves breaking against the cliffs after catching our breaths from the actual hikes. In the stretches between the viewpoints, we’d fall into longer conversations, covering miscellaneous topics spanning from our bucket list destinations to almost having sister-in-laws to our thoughts on theater kids (we think they’re based.) This was my favorite experience from the whole trip. We were able to grow even closer in our friendship, stay active, and be surrounded by the beauty of nature.
Despite not being as closely in each other’s every day lives like we used to, it was as if no time has passed at all. We created a new set of insides jokes, played new songs we’ve been listening to recently (-1000 aura for me having Karma stuck in my head, not Taylor’s version), bought matching Tillamook T-shirts, inadvertently packed matching Peanuts Uniqlo shirts, shared everything we’ve been up to for the past 8 months, and even unpacked my tendency to internalize and absorb all of my feelings instead of expressing them with others. One could say we went pretty deep.
In the stories we exchanged, I could tell we had grown but in different directions. She was immersing herself in the arts and culture through acting and dance after work while I was treading my own path in my corporate tech career and going all in. Despite that, we were still able to find our groove quite quickly. I’m grateful for our roots to be intertwined enough that we were still able to celebrate and love the ways our branches bent and meandered upwards since moving apart.
The healthiest long-distance adult friendships are those of acceptance coupled with an eager embrace for each other’s new selves. I find that the best long-distance adult friendships will vitalize your personality and bring out the core of who you are at the same time. These are the friendships to hold tightest and plan trips for.
