A look into one of my relationships...

A little over a year ago, I moved from a smaller town in Northern California to San Jose for school. I was a little freshman who knew absolutely no one, was on her own for the first time and had no idea how she was going to find a place to fit in this huge school of 30,000 students. Luckily, I had a cousin who lived in the area who invited me to dinner as soon as I moved in and I obviously went because I knew NOONE. When I went to her house for dinner, she talked to me about joining a sorority. She had been in one when she was in high school and explained to me it was a great way to meet people and that I should go through recruitment. She also explained to me that if I went through recruitment, I was not obligated to join a house if I didn’t like it. I was a little bit weary of the idea, but researched it anyways. After I looked into everything, I decided to go through recruitment and it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. I meant so many people and meet people that I now consider some of my best friends. You have to know that when you become a member of a sorority, you automatically become friends with 74 other women; you may not become close with all of them but you are friends with all of them.

            Being thrown into all of these relationships within a 5 day period is a lot to take in, but you naturally become closer with certain people. A few weeks after I joined, I became friends with a girl in my house who we will call Natalie. When we first met we were definitely a I-You relationship. We would hang out a lot and talk about most things but there were obviously subjects we both avoided. I did not open up about my family situation or extremely personal things, but we would talk about things going on in our sorority or classes, what we did over the weekend and things like that. Now she is one of my best friends. We now have an I-Thou relationship. She is someone I can tell anything to and call at any time of the day if I need something and she is the same way with me. I can complain about something that is bugging me and know she will not tell anyone and she can do the same thing with me. We also do pretty much everything together. We go to the gym together, the grocery store together, the bookstore together, pretty much everywhere together. I would say that is the biggest difference in our relationship. We went from being friends that talk and hang out to friends that can talk about anything together and will be there for each other no matter what.

Thanks for reading!
-C