Pranav Jain, from an article titled “The quiet grief of adult friendship”, at The Times of India:
However, somewhere between “Let’s catch up soon” and “Sorry, life has been hectic”, adult friendship became one of the most emotionally significant and least discussed losses of modern life.
The quiet grief of adult friendship
A few weeks ago, a friend called me at 01:40 AM. Not texted. Called. For a brief second, my body prepared itself for bad news. Adulthood has conditioned most of us to believe that late-night…
I found this article both poignant and well timed: I’m about to have my annual get together with two life-long friends, both of whom I met in high school, and our families. We aren’t as close as we were then—who is?—but we make the time to do this gathering once a year, and that effort is the only reason that we haven’t fallen into the trap this article illustrates. Or should I say, “stayed in the trap”, since there were indeed spans of years where we did little more than text each other “happy birthday” or “how have you been” platitudes.
I think that word, “effort”, is the key. If you no longer have any forcing function, like shared school or work, both sides have to decide to put in effort to get together, since it won’t happen automatically, or as easily, as it once did.
In this case, that effort took the form of deciding that we would all do our level best to keep Memorial Day weekend each year reserved for our gathering. It hasn’t been perfect: occasional, important intrusions, such as COVID, or a death in the family, have caused one or the other of us to miss a year here and there. But we’ve all made an effort every year, and that’s made all the difference.
In my experience, it doesn’t have to be a lot of effort, but it does help tremendously to make it automatic. I’ve set up a recurring calendar appointment with another friend who I rarely saw in person, to get our families together for a visit and game night every six weeks. Once we adopted the cadence, having it on the calendar meant that we were way more likely to keep it. And even if we did skip an iteration, another would automatically be around the corner. After discovering that both couples had an interest in pickleball, we’ve met up much more frequently, sometimes weekly, to play. That is something that almost certainly wouldn’t have happened without that initial, relatively small effort.
So, my two small successes in maintaining in-person visits with old friends leads to my advice on the subject: make the effort, put a recurring appointment on the calendar and, most importantly, keep the date as you would any other commitment. You might find that you’re looking forward to the next get together, instead of texting each other about how “life has been hectic” and letting those friendships go stale.
