This month, however, I was pleasantly surprised with the relationship section of Women’s Health magazine, was not about romantic interludes, but instead about friendships.  The author, Leslie Goldman, talks about mourning the friendship of her college besty.

It really is amazing how life changes after dorm life. Especially when it comes to friending.  No longer are your friends a mere whiteboard message away.  Once grown-up life begins, it can be truly difficult to sustain those relationships you thought would last forever.  In Goldman’s case, she courted her friend post graduation, but her friend, always on the flakey side, seemed to grow even flakier when the real world came crashing in.

I’ve been feeling the same way about my college friends lately.  Although, I don’t see any of us as the party to blame, I think our lives took different turns.  For starters, I went to school in Boston, while many of my close college friends stayed in New England, I moved home to New York City.  While, they’re not exactly continents away, the distance is enough to make for an out-of-sight-out-of-mind style friendship.

I was really inspired by this article (especially the timing of it), when my college friend and roommate’s mother found me on facebook and asked that I come to Maine for her daughters baby shower in October.  This friend of mine has quite possibly the exact opposite of my life, she eloped our senior year,  moved to rural Maine upon graduating, and within a year was pregnant with her first son.  We’ve emailed back and forth, less than we should probably, but it often feels like we’ve got nothing but the past to keep us intertwined.  She’s pregnant with her second son now, and well, I miss her.  I know we’ll never stay up talking about our dreams and boy troubles again (after all, her married life boy troubles are very different than my single girl boy troubles), but I loved her as a person then, and while our circumstances have changed, that person is worth flying to Maine for a baby shower for.

The ending of Goldman’s story is a good one, she and her college BFF did finally get back together.  It seems that when her college friend became a mother, she also became more respectful of commitments and other peoples time.

If she can have a happy reunion, hopefully, so can I.  I’ll keep you posted on my re-friending adventure when I go to Maine next month.

Keeping in touch is one of the hardest parts of friendship.  Sometimes  I find it bafflingly hard to keep in contact with friends of mine who live in my neighborhood, not to mention those long distance relationships (platonic of course) that need love and attention.

I’m a big fan of care packages.  In fact, when two of my friends went away to law school I made regularly scheduled care packages a part of their semester.  Timing them for times when I thought they’d need a little lovin’ from home the most.  Moving days, mid-terms, finals, and birthdays:  no time was safe from a surprise batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, or the entirety of the Target $1 section.

Sarah, over at the fantastical blog Pink of Perfection has touched on the art of care packages many times.  I highly suggest snooping around her site.  As for me, my suggestion is to keep them simple, keep them silly, and if they’ve got perishable items:  overnight them.  I learned this the hard way when my mother sent me a care package my freshman year of college only to be lost in the bottomless pit of a mail room and to be delivered months late.  The pastries inside had spider webs as a ganache.  Actually, they were probably preferable to the cafeteria food.  But I digress…

Speaking of college, one of my favorite methods of keeping in touch with long distance friends was hatched when my two best friends and I went to three very different and very far schools.  Nothing made us happier than passing notes in class, and since we considered ourselves an inseparable threesome anything we wrote had to be immediately accessible to the other two.    This made college communication a bit tricky.  Of course we bombarded one another with cards a la snail mail, but it all felt so two sided.  Someone was always being left out.

I’m not sure who came up with the idea of THE BOOK, but THE BOOK came into fruition and has become a tradition in our friendship to this day.  Of course we’ve gone through multiple THE BOOKs by now, but the tradition remains the same.

Our tradition requires one girly, sturdy composition book, a boat load of stickers, pictures, magazine clippings, sappy cards, and stories about our lives.  A simple notebook that is the timeline of our friendship to be shipped back and forth to remind us all that we are always on one anothers minds.

I have to say THE BOOKs from times past are among my most treasured belongings.  Inside are so many of our hopes and dreams, virginities (well not inside, but the stories of), first loves, engagements, embarrassing pictures, declarations of our love for one another-they are truly special mementoes of a long and history rich friendship.  To this day I still get stupidly excited when the book comes in the mail.  Now that college is over my two best friends live in our hometown, I still live away, but not quite as far away, we see each other regularly, but THE BOOK remains our very special way of keeping in touch.

Now that I’ve shown you mine, what are your very special ways to keep in touch with the long distance relationships that mean the most?