For about two hours every Tuesday and Thursday last semester, I would sit in the back of Mason Hall 1448 and listen to my Literary Cognition professor detail the cognitive benefits of storytelling and prosody in poetry. But in the three-minute window before class started, I’d update the girl sitting next to me about the recent highs and lows of my life. I knew about her anniversary plans (and, later, breakup) with her boyfriend. She knew about the biweekly antics of my two golden retrievers. We traded Taylor Swift songs, fantasy football standings and musings on why The New York Times Connections game’s purple category was so confusing. I started looking forward to this class every week.
In 14 short weeks, LSA senior Brenna Prescott and I created a sort of kinship in those red plastic chairs. We were, for lack of a better term, “lecture friends.”
“Lecture friends,” as I found through a plethora of lectures, discussions and labs, were but one microcosm of the ambiguous landscape of college relationships. Those distanced relationships were everywhere around me, from the girls I huddled with in the basements of Sigma Nu and Psi Upsilon my very first semester to my friend’s ex-roommate’s sorority sister who miraculously seemed to be at Skeeps whenever I was. No matter the relationship, there was an invisible line I felt that I just couldn’t cross — something that prevented our friendship from blossoming into something “real.”
As the semesters passed by, I found the line between a lecture friendship and a “real” friendship to be frustratingly blurry. It was both deeply unsettling and reassuring. In the instance of a lecture friend, once class is over, it is likely that we will never see each other again, barring any extreme exceptions. We will go our separate ways, dividing up the little fragments and snippets of our conversations between us, carefully placing them into the mosaic of our identities as we pretend not to notice each other as we share awkward eye contact on the Mason Hall staircase.
That short-lived connection — and subsequent dismissal of what I believed to be genuine bonding and camaraderie — was almost too much to bear. I didn’t like that a relationship sparked to life on the third floor of the Central Campus Classroom Building, regardless of how many inside jokes came from it, was doomed to be temporary. Wasn’t the point of college to meet your forever friends in the places you least expected? To walk into a crowded introductory-Python class in the Modern Language Building, sit next to someone and find out you had a mutual hatred of chocolate when icebreakers began?
With a “lecture friend,” I had someone I could check in with when I slept through my seven alarms for Great Books. I had someone to suffer with when our linear algebra midterm demanded us to invent a new proof on a Wednesday morning. I had someone that, after the end of our shared STATS 250 lab adventures, I would maybe trade nods if I saw them on South University until the day I graduated.
Seeing how my lecture friends thrived after the semester ended further added to the fragility of these relationships. Despite no longer keeping in touch, I scrolled past their nights out at Rick’s, various tailgates and birthday celebrations plastered on their Instagram stories. It was bizarre that someone I had shared the majority of my semesterly angst with could continue to exist in a suddenly separate and distant world from mine.
Seeing this separate world emphasized that “lecture friend” relationships were merely transactional: nothing more, nothing less. I’d tell you what I got on this matrix multiplication question, you’d tell me what pages of “Beowulf” we had to read for tomorrow’s discussion. There was no wiggle room. No ability to continue these relationships past the last day of class, never mind how much we enjoyed each other’s company. Our association was formed on a shaky foundation, built on comparing essay theses and last week’s notes.
I understand that I will not be lifelong friends with all 33,488 undergraduates on the Ann Arbor campus. I understand that treasured friendships are built upon months and years of commitment and shared memories. I understand that, at a certain point, all relationships arrive at a crossroads: you either grow together in the years to come, or the friendship ends. But where did this shared agreement come from — that the end of the academic semester was the end of an enjoyable, if not slightly-past-surface-level relationship? The risk of taking the friendship “too far” was both terrifying and exciting. Outside of the slim chance you summoned the courage to “cross” that line, the embarrassment of misreading your connection was mortifying.
As the weeks flew by last semester, I saw my friendship with Brenna grow into something more than the typical “lecture friend” relationship. I couldn’t quite identify it — it wasn’t quite friendship, but it was a step above trading numbers just to confirm what chapter we had to read for tomorrow’s class. We followed each other on Instagram. We wished each other a happy birthday. We talked about her thesis and capstone project, my creative writing professor and our general ambivalence toward Michigan basketball.
Here we were, sharing rather intimate details of our lives that “real friends” would know about, yet we hadn’t even so much as hung out together past 2:30 p.m. on Thursdays.
That ambiguity — the slight blurring of the lines between Literary Cognition “point person” and “person that I have fun with and enjoy talking to” — was enough to spark a flurry of anxious thoughts. I thought I understood the distinction: “Lecture friends” were not “real friends,” and “going-out friends” weren’t necessarily “study friends.” Allowing myself to not immediately categorize this relationship within the classroom’s four cinderblock walls let it thrive. By not cramming it into the label of “lecture friend,” I was able to find a more fulfilling and satisfying experience in the interactions.
There had been radio silence between Brenna and I since the fall semester ended. Reaching out to talk to her, let alone to interview her about our status as former lecture friends, was nerve wracking. The whole point of lecture friends is that the relationship ends when class ends. There was absolutely never a reason to cross that invisible demarcator between “friend” and “class resource.” Attempting to have a metadiscussion on our relationship decidedly crossed that line.
After rewriting the Instagram DM five times, deleting three heart-hands emojis from the end of the message and much internal debate if I could even find another willing source to talk about this idea, I sent all abandon to the wind and hit “send.” After the purple bubble appeared, I promptly threw my phone onto my bed and tried to breathe evenly again.
Two days later, Brenna and I folded ourselves into a cramped table at Ann Arbor Coffee Roasting Company. Baristas chatted away behind us as the mobile order machine churned out a long stream of Snackpass receipts. Thoughtfully, Brenna watched the closest barista to us move through the machinations of a matcha latte. After catching each other up on our current slate of classes, relationships and winter breaks, we tried to figure out what makes a “lecture friendship” so uniquely strange.
“We talk all the time, we text all the time, but should we hang out?” Brenna said as she waited for her coffee to cool. “For example, if we have to watch an episode of ‘Superstore’ for a class, it’d be so fun if we did a watch party. Or, if we sat down with books we had to read together and, like, talk about them. But are we that close?”
That idea of “being close enough” was precisely what baffled me with lecture friendships. There was no objective marker of when a friendship was “enough” to transition into a real connection — ducking through slick, faux, tarp walls at backyard frat parties during Welcome Week with someone was “enough” to warrant another hangout, but sitting next to each other on a Thursday afternoon and learning about the minutiae of your life wasn’t.
“Even though I love my normal friends and those friendships, it is kind of nice to be like, ‘I’m going to this class twice a week, I’m going to hang out with my friend from this class and there’s no pressure,’ ” Brenna said. “I don’t have to worry about if I have to hang out with them or anything. I get to have this good thing to look forward to when I go to class — it also makes me go to class.”
Attendance incentives notwithstanding, I found myself agreeing with her. After a brief hug and mutual assurances that we’d try to keep in touch, I headed down State Street, trying to sift through my thoughts. Though I was worried I’d spend the interview calculating when was the earliest appropriate time to leave, we ended up chatting for nearly an hour. From the desire to fit each relationship into a nice, neat category to the web of connections we make in college, she verbalized my ideas with ease. Whether the foundation of our relationship was strong enough to support a friendship outside of class, the experience we shared in those stiff, red swivel chairs wasn’t immediately diminished.
These situational relationships become less of a death sentence and more of an opportunity. Want to continue exploring the friendship outside of Angell Hall? Invite them to grab coffee with you. Have the feeling you just won’t vibe out in the “real world?” Trade well wishes for exams and be comforted by the fact you will probably never see this person again until either graduation or in a cramped elevator ride in the Shapiro Undergraduate Library. It is okay to have temporary relationships, and it is okay to “cross that line” and ask your lecture friend to hang out after class if the friendship’s impermanence makes your skin crawl. Not all friendships need to have the pressure of becoming life-long connections, and that’s the beauty of “lecture friends.”
I am not sure when — or if — I will see Brenna again. I am not sure if I will ever sit in Room 1448 again. I am not sure if I will meet another “lecture friend” who shares my fervor for the Detroit Lions. I am not sure if I will meet a lifelong friend in my early English literature class tomorrow afternoon, and I cannot wait to find out.
Statement Columnist Charlotte Parent can be reached at cmparent@umich.edu.