Four hundred strangers standing in a gymnasium wearing lanyards and the same expression, which I can only describe as aggressively approachable. That was my college freshman orientation. Everybody smiling too hard. Everybody laughing too loud at things that were not funny. Everybody performing the role of Person Who Already Has Friends while simultaneously being desperate to make some. I watched a guy introduce himself to the same person twice in twenty minutes because the first conversation ended in mutual panic and neither of them knew how to exit gracefully so they just kind of drifted apart and then orbited back like two confused satellites. The whole thing operates on a specific kind of lie. The lie is that everyone else is doing fine. That the girl sitting cross-legged on the quad with three other people she met forty-five minutes ago has somehow already built a friend group with inside jokes and emotional depth. She has not. She is performing the same desperate arithmetic you are, which is if I look like I belong then maybe I will start to belong and if I start to belong then maybe this churning feeling in my stomach will stop. The Survey Center on American Life reported in 2021 that the percentage of Americans with no close friends has quadrupled since 1990. That trend does not pause for orientation week. It accelerates.

The Performance Is the Whole Event

Here is what nobody tells you about college orientation. The structured activities, the icebreakers, the scavenger hunts designed by well-meaning resident advisors, they are not actually designed to help you make friends. They are designed to create the appearance that friendships are being made. The institution needs you to feel welcomed because unwelcomed freshmen transfer and transfers cost money. So they engineer three days of forced proximity and call it community. They put you in a circle and make you say your name and your major and a fun fact about yourself and somewhere around the forty-seventh fun fact you realize that nobody is listening to anyone else's fun fact because everyone is rehearsing their own. I said I could juggle. I cannot juggle. I have never juggled. I panicked. The Cigna 2024 Loneliness Index found that young adults ages 18 to 22 are the loneliest demographic in America. Not elderly people in nursing homes. Not remote workers in studio apartments. College-aged kids surrounded by thousands of peers their exact age with their exact amount of free time. The proximity is the cruelest part. You are so close to so many people and the distance feels infinite because everyone is wearing the same mask and nobody will take theirs off first.

Somebody Has to Go First

The friendships that actually form during college almost never come from orientation. They come from the weird hours. Three in the morning in the dorm kitchen when someone is making ramen and you are making toast and neither of you has the energy to perform anymore so you just talk. Actually talk. The real kind, where you say something embarrassing and the other person says something embarrassing back and the mutual embarrassment becomes the foundation. Holt-Lunstad's research found that the quality of social connections matters far more than the quantity. One honest conversation at three in the morning outweighs forty icebreakers. One admission of I have no idea what I am doing here outweighs a hundred fun facts about juggling. I think about that gymnasium sometimes. All of us standing there in our new sneakers and our lanyards, so terrified of being alone that we could not stop pretending long enough to realize that everyone else was terrified too. That the entire room was full of people who wanted the same thing and were all too afraid to say it. Somebody has to go first. Somebody has to say I do not know anyone here and I am scared and this is weird and I do not actually know how to juggle. That person usually ends up with the best friends. Because they broke the pact. They stopped performing. And the relief that floods a room when one person stops pretending is something I have never seen replicated by any icebreaker, any scavenger hunt, any orientation leader with a clipboard and a megaphone.