Holding hands, giving hugs, and spending every minute together is very typical of college girl friendships. Instagram feeds are full of photos of girls holding hands, hugging, and laughing, accompanied with captions confessing love for their friends pictured above.

This is great--everyone is happy--except me.

I have found that I am completely opposite of all my friends.

I have found that I would much rather spend half my time in my room reading or binge-watching my current Netflix obsession ("Parks and Rec") alone than have a weekend full of movie nights and chatting in the living room. I would much rather take funny, candid photos than take the typical college-besties photos. I would much rather have alone time be the first thing I do when I walk in the door rather than chat about my day with friends.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions and preferences, but the issue is, I seem like an outsider. It seems that I am the only one who would rather spend more time alone than with friends. My loving of some alone time makes me seem like I don't want to hang out with my friends--I may come off as angry or upset--but none of this is true.

It seems like I'm alone in my alone time preference, but I know there are more of us. And on behalf of anyone else that values their alone time, I have something to say to our more interactive friends:

We still love you! We still want to take pictures, watch movies, go out on trips and adventures. Enjoying spending time alone doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy time with you! We're not angry with or upset with you, we just like some time to chill by ourselves. We love movie nights and weekend parties and random chats and gossip sessions--just in between our time of watching shows and reading our newest book.