How do you stay in touch with friends both near and far?

Whether it's in-person laughs or online LOLs, what works for you, dear reader?

Like sand in the house after a beach day, my friends are scattered here, there, and everywhere. To make things worse, I’m not amazing at keeping in touch. It’s something I’m trying to be better at. And I know I’m not the only one, so let’s help each other out, shall we, dear readers?

Oodles of research studies, not to mention common sense, demonstrates the importance of friends (or, in nerdy psychology language, “social support.”) But ever-shifting work and family responsibilities, not to mention the sheer intensity of living in 2024, can make maintaining our existing friendships—both near and far—a challenge. 

Me trying to figure out how to maintain friendships in 2024

So let’s delve into an interesting study that followed best friends from college for 19 years after graduation. Over that time period, participants reported an average of 5.8 changes of residence since leaving college and lived, on average, 895 miles from one another. 

What was the secret to staying close over 895 miles and 19 years? How did they do it?

One was the duration of the friendship. Friends who had already been friends for a long time before the study were more likely to stay friends. Okay, that makes sense.

But the second came seemingly out of nowhere: the friends’ score on the game Password, where one friend has to guess a secret word using one-word clues from the other friend.

Those of us who remember this are officially old.

As it turns out, this makes sense, too: the researchers hypothesized that the Password score indicated “understanding how each other thinks and communicates.” Essentially, it means you get each other. You vibe with them. 

What really surprised me was that the secret sauce of closeness over time wasn’t any of the other things the study measured:

• Staying close wasn’t about frequency of contact—how often the friends saw or talked to each other didn’t make a big difference.

• It wasn’t about each friend’s reported commitment to the friendship. 

• It wasn’t the degree to which friends reported “striving to make him/her happy when together,” 

The Password score trumped them all. 

I found these findings simultaneously extremely reassuring and somewhat unhelpful. It’s extremely reassuring because, as the researchers concluded, friendships seem to last because of “mutual understanding” (read: getting each other). And that means friendships can be maintained even if you don’t see each other much, so long as friends have previously achieved a strong degree of closeness. 

Okay, maybe you don’t have to be THAT close

It’s unhelpful because there’s no magic formula—FaceTime twice a week, work hard to make them happy—that can manufacture closeness. That means we’re left to our own devices to figure out what works for us. 

Which brings me to: dear reader, what works for you? How do you maintain the vibes when your friends are 895 miles away, literally or metaphorically? 

I’ve been asking around and here are a few of the answers I’ve gotten:

• An acquaintance of mine has a “virtual book club” with her three best friends from college. They read a book per month and meet by Skype to discuss. Inevitably, they discuss the book for a few minutes, but then spend the rest of the time talking about everything but the book.

• Two other friends use their evening commute to stay in touch by phone. They often happen to be sitting in traffic at the same time, albeit in different cities, so they chat on speakerphone until one of them arrives home.

• Another friend texts one faraway friend per weekday, give or take. Sometimes the text doesn’t lead to anything, but sometimes it turns into a long string of text exchanges, a spur-of-the-moment FaceTime call, or a planned phone date for Wednesday at 4. And at one text a weekday, over a year, she reaches out multiple times to many different people. It’s not much effort on any given day, but in aggregate it’s priceless. 

For me—warning: this is nerdy—I get a lot out of body doubling. Writing is an isolating job, so some of the best advice I’ve gotten is “make your friends your colleagues.” Now, multiple times a week, I’ll hop on Zoom with a friend, we’ll chat, and then we’ll work for an hour or so on mute. The chatting-to-work ratio can vary widely, but that’s sort of the point.

No, Jason Momoa, not a literal body double.

What are your best practices for staying close with your friends? Answer in the comments or, if you got this newsletter by email, reply and let me know. I’ll aggregate and share your responses. Everyone is looking for ways to stay connected.

If you found this post useful, there’s a lot more in How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists. And hey, there’s a preorder button right there! 

Be kind to others and yourself!