A few days ago, my friend and I were wandering around Washington D.C., posting photos and videos of each other on our social media when he turned to me suddenly and asked: “Do you think people see us on each other’s Instagrams and wonder why we’re friends?” The question caught me off guard, but I realized he was right: we are from two different years, different countries, different majors, have completely different friend groups and have next to no overlapping extracurriculars, hobbies or interests. And yet, here I am, exploring New York and traveling around the East Coast with someone who six months ago I only knew as “my friend’s British roommate who I think doesn’t like me.”

One of NYU Abu Dhabi’s greatest strengths and most frustrating drawbacks is the constant transience of the student body. Students are regularly shuffling between campuses and global sites, taking time off for leaves of absence or military service and generally just hopping around the globe. This perpetual movement is great for achieving a global college experience, but laborious when trying to find stability and fostering strong relationships. While our mobility was curbed to an extent during the pandemic, it has since begun to pick up once again and we’re all feeling the effects of it.

In navigating this ongoing flux of people, most students are constantly looking for new friendships to make up for the ones that change or are lost. Along the way, some incredibly unlikely connections are made and we find ourselves bonding closely with people we never expected. But, I think many people, including myself for a long time, resist these unlikely friendships because they seem more difficult than sticking to people who are more familiar.

During Marhaba, I definitely clung to other American students. In such a new environment, it felt easiest and most comfortable to stick to what I knew and spend my time with people who (I thought) were most relatable. But even with such closely shared backgrounds and experiences, I found that many of these relationships turned out to not be as meaningful or close as I expected. A huge part of my time at NYUAD has been recognizing that sometimes what should be the most likely connections just don’t work.

I’ve met people who are basically my carbon copy — with the same background, interests, aspirations, hobbies — who should have been a great match for me … but we just didn’t click. For a long time I found this to be incredibly frustrating and took it as if I were doing something wrong: there was no logical reason that this person and I shouldn’t be friends. But logic and compatibility on paper should not be the metric by which we measure friendships, and sticking to these markers prevents many potentially beautiful connections from being formed.

We often idealize and crave relationships with people we “relate” to. Just look at social media — relatability has become the trick to making hundreds of thousands of dollars by “just being you” and accruing a fan base that praises you for being “relatable” and “just like a normal person.” That demand for relatability extends into our personal lives as well, and while relatability can be a great way to start exploring a relationship with someone, it’s not nearly enough to sustain any meaningful connection. Devaluing relatability in my interactions has led to some very unexpected and unusual friendships that I never would have explored or established had I continued to mold my social life around people who were most similar to me.

I’ve also learned to devalue first impressions. As someone who reads heavily into — and dramatically overthinks — people’s behavior and mannerisms, I squandered many potential relationships on the basis that I thought our first encounters were awkward, cold or forced and that there was no possible way we could get along. In fact, a concerning amount of my close friendships were born out of mutual impressions of “I thought you hated me when we first met.”

Now, my most unlikely friendships are what sustain me. I get lunch between classes with the friend who was once “that one girl who I always see at the gym at 11:30 PM.” I have movie nights with “the intimidating guy who used to be my editor at The Gazelle.” I have weekly phone calls with “the sophomore who gave me Kazakh candy during his candidate weekend.” These are all relationships that even eight months ago I would never imagine being a part of my life, but have since become some of the most important connections I have.