Group of friends celebrates after finishing the Nearly Naked Mile on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025 at CU Boulder. (Rebecca Schima/CU Independent)
Alexia: Hi! I’m Alexia Bailey, a junior here at the University of Colorado Boulder. Because I’ve been here and seen things, I’m here to share everything I’ve picked up so far, which is a surprising amount of information. “What’s Eating at Alexia” is my unofficial and unfiltered guide to some of the things that being a CU Boulder Buff brings. Think of it as your guide to navigating everything that makes CU Boulder, well, CU Boulder. Whether you’re a freshman finding your footing or a senior with “no body, no crime” level grievances about finals week, I’m here to share my takes, tips and honest observations on everything from the sometimes-unpredictable choices CU Boulder makes to navigating online controversies. College is a wild, unforgettable ride, and “What’s eating at Alexia” is here to make sense of some of it, one opinion at a time.
I can’t tell if it’s the constant comparisons to Carrie Bradshaw from “Sex and the City” that I get or reconnecting with my hometown friends, but lately I’ve been thinking endlessly about relationships. Not romantic relationships, oh God, no, but friendships. More specifically, the idea of a “best friend.”
Buffs, we go to a school of roughly 40,000 students, with over 30 recognized Greek life organizations and nearly 500 Registered Student Organizations. We are constantly surrounded by people, yet there’s still this strange expectation that everyone should have one definitive person: a ride-or-die, a platonic soulmate and a permanent “favorite.” Yet, all of my friends seem to have multiple of these “definitive” people, in the form of multiple best friends, each with varying degrees of closeness. Even I, with all my humor and charm, partake in this system of having different people for different forms of emotional citizenship in my life.
So, all of this to say, it’s 2026, we’re in college, and maybe, just maybe, the best friend label is dead.
To me, the problem starts with the fact that we treat adult friendships like childhood ones. Somewhere along the way, we were taught that everyone is supposed to have one person who knows everything about you and chooses you above everyone else. But adulthood and college life don’t really work that way.
Friendships shift as people move, change, grow apart, grow back together and sometimes exist in entirely different versions of your life. One friend becomes the person you call crying at 2 a.m. Another is the one who makes you laugh until your stomach hurts. Another only appears every six months but somehow still knows exactly who you are. So why do I still feel like there has to be one winner? The whole concept starts to feel a little childish, like asking a parent to name their favorite kid. Technically, there’s probably one who’s a little easier to deal with at the moment, but saying it out loud would probably ruin the entire ecosystem.
However, what I feel my previous argument lacks is that it’s natural human behavior to have favorites. I mean, the “best” in best friend has to mean singularity, right? Like the best of them all? Dear readers, I can even admit that this is where both language and literature have failed us. “Best” implies ranking, permanence and a kind of emotional finality that most friendships just don’t possess. It turns something fluid into something fixed, like we’re supposed to assign people permanent positions in our lives and never update the roster. It’s like marrying someone after only knowing them for weeks or months, which sounds nonsensical because it is.
The people that we let see our inner lives are not static, they never were, and neither are we. The person who knows you best during one semester might not be the same person you grow closest to in the next. I can count on one hand how many people I know that are still friends with their freshman year friend group. This goes not to scare you, incoming freshman, but just to see that as you changed in high school, you will change in college, and that is okay.
We cling to the best friend label, probably just because it’s simple. It’s easier to say “my best friend” than it is to explain a whole network of people who show up for you in different ways.
So, both to you incoming freshmen as you dream about your dorm, and also to you rising seniors as you dread figuring out your after-college jobs, I implore you not to ask, “who is my best friend?” but instead, “who is in my life in this moment, and what do they give me?” Because the truth is, as you grow older, friendship doesn’t (and maybe shouldn’t) feel like a hierarchy. It feels more like a web, constantly shifting, sometimes tightening, sometimes loosening, but never really built around just one central point, except yourself. And if that’s the case, then maybe the pressure to choose a single “best” is the real myth we’ve been carrying around.
Perhaps then, we can follow Carrie Bradshaw’s words of advice, that “when it comes to relationships, we’re all like little planets with our own solar system of friends.”
Contact CU Independent Managing Editor Alexia Bailey at alexia.bailey@colorado.edu
