College is supposed to be the best time of our lives, right? Part of the reason that college has such an infamous reputation is because this is the time when many people are most open to meeting new people. It’s very easy to make lifelong friends at this stage in life because college students often have the most free time to dedicate to building friendships. The 2014 American Time Use Survey found that people who are between 20-24 years old spend the most time per day socializing of any other age group. At this age, people are communicating in person, over the phone, and using the internet including social media and dating apps. Media multiplexity theory says that the more ways that people use technology and social media to connect with one another, the stronger their relationships will be.

That’s important because further research shows that college students evaluate friendships by degree of closeness with the other person. This means that we place value on relationships with people that we think are closer to us and will then start to spend more time with those people, therefore automatically neglecting relationships with people that are not as close to us. William Rawlins, a professor of Interpersonal Communication at Ohio University will be referred to throughout a few different articles on this site. His work says that the three expectations of close friends are “Someone to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy”. Rawlins went on to say that friendships really start to change during this stage of young adulthood because we “seek out friends who share our values”. This information shows that we really value the emotional satisfaction that we can get from spending time with friends and it possibly sheds light on what college students are looking for when they spend most of their time socializing each day.

To continue, Jeffrey Hall conducted a study using college students who were making new friends and found that people who remain in the acquaintance stage are those who spend less than 30 hours together over the course of almost 3 months. What this suggests is that to become real friends with someone you need to spend a significant amount of time with someone, at least 45 hours, within the first month or so of meeting them. This is further proof that the choices we make affect our friendships and our understanding of what those friendships mean to us. In light of the media multiplexity theory, perhaps some of this time could be spent looking at shared media and shared activities.

The communicate bond belong theory, also attributed to Jeffrey Hall, suggests that one of our central needs is to spend time conversing socially with other people. This is related to the ways that college students spend their time because it means that we need to be with others. All of that time spent hanging out in the common areas and lounges is integral to our experiences of friendships. This information suggests that it is important to join clubs, attend your classes, and be kind to those around you because it is essential to our wellbeing. While it is extremely easy to do this in the college setting when it is in person, the recent pandemic has definitely changed the way that people communicate and interact with one another. During the toughest times of the pandemic, people often had no choice but to communicate with one another through social media and technology such as zoom or skype.

A Stock Image of A Friend Group With 5 College Students