The question that is at the forefront of my community, and it undoubtedly will affect everyone, no matter where they’re from is, why are hometown friends unique, and what is the difference between hometown friends and any other friends? There are many resources that one could use to answer that question, but the 10 that I have found have a general unanimous answer to it. The ten sources focus on a variable of different aspects of hometown friends, from location to knowing someone before they even knew themselves, there are plenty of explanations to answer why these friends are so near and dear to people’s hearts.
Hometown friends are different from other people one meets in college, work, or anywhere else because friends from home have a connected history that can bind people for life. Since they’re hometown friends, obviously the hometown where the friendship was made is exceedingly important to the formula to this interesting dynamic.
The community in question is the Village of Scarsdale, NY which is not known outside the sphere in which it exists. With the sources such as ‘Scarsdale, N.Y.: A Pricey Suburb with an Old-World Air’ from the New York Times, it illustrates the uniqueness of this small town. It helps explain why people from this town are drawn towards it and their fellow neighbors. People’s bonds formed in this town is an everlasting one because where you grew up is shared by only a small few out of the entire population. Hence why people around the globe have an underlying connection with their hometown friends. Even if many years past since they last spoke there is still a connection.
Time does many things to friendships, to ending them completely, or having the relationship deep in the background. The two sources that really demonstrate this characteristic of hometown friends, ‘How Your Relationship with Hometown Friends Change’ and ’14 Reasons Your Hometown Friends Are Your Friends for Life’, are both found on Elite Daily. Another important source that relates to the topic is ‘There’s nothing like meeting a hometown friend’ found in the Dakota Student. These articles are extremely similar in substance, but their writing points are very important to the Hometown Friends community. Time does the same thing to everyone, either pushes them away from one another or pushes them towards each other. However, for the rekindling of the relationship of hometown friends are more forgiving than those towards other relationships. The link between hometown friends is that of a very deep nature. The shared experiences from Pre-k to senior year in high school is something that even a decade couldn’t erase.
The place where this community started was in Scarsdale as previously stated, however, Eastchester is also very much at the forefront. Eastchester High School was where the majority of the community went to school. Two important things to know while researching this community is about the place itself, the article in the NY Times was important, but it does not give the specific details and history as does the Wikipedia articles on both Scarsdale and Eastchester. These two articles help add texture and background to the research and advance the understandings of what makes these places different compared to the rest of the United States.
As it has been stated numerous times over this post, the hometown is an important role of any community of hometown friends. However, one individual wrote an op-ed in the NY Times titled, ‘I Don’t Have a Hometown. It’s Taught me a Lot’. Here, the writer explained their life and how staying in one place for too long wasn’t part of their life. They had to learn new languages, cultures, and they had to also make new friends. Of course, this person made friends, but after moving from country to country, there isn’t a person or group to fall back on, no one to share a similar experience. The absence of a hometown to this individual was not life-ending, but it definitely illustrates the distinctiveness of what Hometowns have, and offer to a person and community.
A writer that did have a hometown wrote ‘Did Your Hometown Shape Your Personality’ found on the blog website, A Cup of Jo. Here this author of the post makes the case the relationship of friends from home, was an integral part of not only their own lives but of anyone who has a hometown. There was also a major focus on the hometown itself, and how the regions you grew up in and the people you grew up with influenced you far beyond you could imagine. This blog post exemplifies how and why hometown friends deserve their own category of the word friends.
Another intricacy of the framing question is how hometown friends move far and wide away from home. Instead of people just letting the relationship die, people hang on to it for as long as possible. Some, if not most people just move on if they lost touch with a friend they made later in life, however, this is not true with hometown friends. There are plenty of articles about staying connected to hometown friends, but the two sources I used for this community is, ‘Friend-Focused: Maintaining long-distance friendships and relationships in college’ and ‘7 Easy Ways to Stay in Touch with Your High School Besties’ found in the Colombia Spectator and ucribs.com, respectively. These two sources lay out the multitudes of ways one could stay in touch with people that are no longer living down the street. The sources also point out that people, in general, are lazy, if they don’t want to do it they won’t. Yet people still put in the extra effort to stay connected with your friends that you’ve known since kindergarten.
All these individual sources are all laced together through a binding power similar to those of hometown friends. Many people have their varying opinions about hometown friends and the degree of importance of people and people’s lives, and through these sources, they outline the community of hometown friends and the many facets within the community.