Will I find “my people”?
Right now, countless incoming college students are asking that precise question.
But consider that “your people” may change in this moment of transition, says WashU philosopher and friendship expert Fannie Bialek.
“One of the real beauties of this time of life and this environment is that you might not know what you’re looking for,” Bialek said. “That can be really hard and also really exciting. Everything might turn out differently than you thought — and for the better.”
Bialek, an assistant professor at the WashU John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, recently published the book “Love in Time: An Ethical Inquiry” and teaches the popular WashU course “Love & Friendship.” For more than a decade, she has studied friendship in its many forms.
“Friendship is not a silly topic or just a side thing to think about,“ she said. “The meaning of the good life, what makes a good friendship — these can be rigorous topics of philosophical and other forms of inquiry. I find treating those very ordinary things with moral seriousness, as well as intellectual seriousness, really exciting.”
Here, Bialek shares her advice to new students, her definition of friendship and how technology has changed the nature of friendships.
What advice would you give to incoming college students who are worried about making friends?
College is a time to meet people who don’t come from the same town as you; who come from families and communities that may be very different from your family and community; who have different aims and hopes for the future. That brings with it the concern of whether you’ll find ‘your people,’ but also the amazing discovery that you might not know yet who your people are. Who you turn out feeling happiest around, most comfortable around and most yourself around may be very different from those you would consider today to be your people.
What makes a good friend?
There’s an understanding of happiness and relationships that I really like from Italian political philosopher Adriana Cavarero. She argues that the people we love and care about and feel good with in a relationship are the people who narrate us back to ourselves in ways we recognize. I really like that description because it’s not saying, ‘The people I love are the people who tell me I’m great,’ but maybe, ‘The people I love recognize the things that worry me and narrate that back,’ or ‘the people I love value me for things I value about myself,’ even if they give me the tough love of telling me that I need to work harder on something. It’s not flattery; it’s about recognition and the project of mutual narration. That sounds like it belongs to a very intimate relationship, but there are shades of that too even when you just meet people. Who makes you feel like yourself? Who makes you feel recognized?
How should new students approach changing friendships with people back home? How have technology and social media affected our ability to get through these transitions?
Today’s college students are certainly better at maintaining friendships than I was when I went to college, because we didn’t have technology of this kind. It seems really cool, and a change that I hope is largely good. Still, I can imagine that technology makes some forms of transition difficult.
It’s important to recognize that there are a lot of relationships — Aristotle has a great phrase for this that makes them sound really bad — which might be ‘utility friendships.’ I think Aristotle’s category can be helpful because there are some people who are real friends, but maybe mostly because they were useful to you, or because being friends with them played a kind of functional role. They might also just be nice to be around, what Aristotle would call a friendship of pleasure. Both of these descriptions sound unflattering to us today, and certainly aren’t things we want said about ourselves. But I like that Aristotle identifies them as real friendships (if not their highest form).
These relationships can be difficult, though, in another way. You might find life goes on without them a bit more easily than you’d expect, that you miss these friends less than you’d imagined, or that you miss having someone play that role more than you miss that person particularly. It can be difficult to realize that a person wasn’t your best friend, but just someone fun to have in your math class. And if you still call or text the person that you liked in your math class all the time, maybe it makes the shift away more difficult.
What is your favorite thing about studying friendship? How have you applied your research to your own life?
There’s something wonderful about taking friendship really seriously. I think we often think about friends, culturally, as the people you go have fun with, or maybe the people you use as lay therapists when you’re having a hard time. We talk about friendship as a kind of icing on the cake of a good life, good for when you need to take a break from work or get a little extra support, but certainly not as important as your career, familial obligations or romantic attachments.
I love having a vocabulary for understanding of friendship as genuinely important to the good life, not icing on the cake. I think of friendships as rich, ethical relationships that have to do with pursuing the good with others and loving other things together. And I think that thinking about friendship in this way has given me a great deal of happiness in my friendships. I am happy to resist the pressure to value friendships less than other relationships, or to imagine my most meaningful relationships need to be familial or romantic. A good life can be made by good friends — but don’t worry about finding those friends on the first day of freshman year.
Read more advice about the college transition in WashU Experts: A guide for new college students.
