BBC Three’s new series Clique has us thinking about how friendship dynamics change as we get older and share new experiences. When Sophie, 21, from Northampton, went to university with her best friend Jane, she thought they'd be inseparable for the next three years. But their friendship barely lasted beyond their first term. Here, she tells The Debrief where she thinks it went wrong.. *
Before university, my best friend and I went travelling to South America, just the two of us. We were already close, but that made us even closer. I thought if our friendship could stand that test, it could stand anything.
When we got to university I moved into halls, but she wanted to go straight into a house. I was really excited about moving into student accommodation because obviously I’d never done it before, but she really didn’t want to. She just wanted to hang out with people who were into sports like her. And to be fair, she was doing nursing which was quite a full on course.
We had very different expectations from uni, I've now realised. I probably should have realised then the way things were going.
I think because we had spent so much time together before, I just assumed we would stay friends. As a result I don’t think I made enough effort, but honestly I thought we were so close, it didn’t matter if soon we only spoke a few times a week.
Before university we had been best friends for three years, and were totally inseparable. So for a long time I had had my heart set on living with her in second year. I guess I saw our first year as a chance for us to branch out.
After seeing each other and speaking all day every day at home in those three years before university, we went to seeing each other no more than once a month - even though we were a ten-minute walk away from each other. Really slowly, we stopped talking and soon we weren’t seeing each other at all.
I don’t think she ever wanted to live with me, and I think she felt really awkward about that. I wonder now if that’s why she slowly stopped calling me, to push me away somehow.
It was just before Christmas when I finally realised something was actually wrong. We knew we’d be good living together because we’d been travelling all over a different continent. And she thought the total opposite, saying she didn’t want to live with me. She didn’t give me any explanation, she just told me she was moving in with other people and that was that.
As you've probably realised by now, I hadn’t seen it coming at all. In hindsight I should have read the warning signs and done something sooner but you get so caught up in everything when you’re first at uni.
I think I was probably absorbed in other friendships at the time. I probably changed a bit too, but not so much that it explains what happens, and why my best friend became a total stranger.
Optimistically, I still thought we might stay friends, and that she’d come around. But then the real clanger came - she dropped out of university and didn’t even tell me.
I tried to speak to her a couple of times and tried to see her when I went home, but she had a new life by then. She’s the kind of person who is always incredibly busy.
She still makes time to sees everyone she lived with at university and her old course mates though - she's always posting pictures of them on social media.
Looking back now I would do things differently that first term at uni. I think I’d try and speak to her more often and made more of an effort to keep in touch. But also I've realised she very easily jumps from friendship to friendship, and because she was in a new place maybe she had the chance to escape all the things that tied her to home.
The last time I saw her just before Christmas. It was painfully awkward - I bumped into her working in the supermarket. She was like ‘let’s meet up and we should do this and do that’ in that way people do even though they know it’s never going to happen.
I still see all my friends from home, but she doesn’t. I think now she’s started a new life. I think that when she went to uni she wanted to get away from everything that reminded her of home, and I was one of those things. But honestly, I don't think I'll ever fully understand what happened.
So what could I have done differently? Said something earlier? Made more effort? Accepted that our friendship was over earlier? I don’t think it would have made a difference – we’re such different people to who we were when we were 17, and we’ll be different people again in five years time. Maybe friendship for life is an unattainable myth.
*Check out the new series Clique on BBC Three and see how things take a very sinister turn when childhood best friends Holly and Georgia go to Edinburgh University and find their friendship and loyalty put to the test. *
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.