Seeing friendships as flexible and not fragile.
By Marisa G. Franco Ph.D.
Did you know we lose half our friends every seven years?
And the most common reason we do isn’t that we’ve become fundamentally incompatible. It’s because we’re no longer in the same place at the same time. Many of our friendships are effectively “locationships.” We require something called “social embeddedness” (a similar context) for them to continue.
The problem, however, may not be that friendships commonly decrease in closeness over time. It’s that we may assume that just because a friendship is less close than it used to be, it is over. In fact, one study found that reaching out to a friend whom we haven’t spoken to in a while is just as uncomfortable as reaching out to a stranger. In that study, fewer than one-third of people reached out to an old friend, even though they wanted to reconnect, thought the person wanted to hear from them, and were given time to draft a message.
According to recommendations from a study on long-distance friendships, when we assume that a friendship is “flexible” and not “fragile,” it’s more sustainable. This means that if we haven’t spoken to a friend in a while, we should assume that we can still re-engage at any time. In fact, the study found that about half of friendships did not linearly increase in closeness. They went through ups and downs in their levels of intimacy. About a quarter of close friendships dwindled down to casual ones at some time point, but then ended up transforming into best friendships later on. But if people assumed that because the friendship wasn’t as close as it used to be, then it was over, then they would have missed out on potential best friends. We should not assume that just because a friendship has lapsed that it’s over.
How do we get ourselves to reach out to these old friends? We need scaffolding. One study involved having people send several messages to current friends, and then they were given time to draft a message to an old friend. When they practiced initiating with old friends (rather than just scrolling through their friends’ social media in the control group), they were more likely to reach out to the old friend. If you’re nervous to rekindle an old friendship, practice initiating with a current friend, and it’ll be easier to initiate with an older one.
Your lapsed friendships are not strangers. You still share memories, history, and an awareness that you have the possibility to like each other, because you have in the past. Don’t be so sure that your old friends have moved on; they may just be waiting to hear from you. In fact, though people were reluctant to initiate with old friends, in one study, they reported being very open to that friend reaching out to them.
Friendships don’t end as much as fall asleep, and a simple check-in can wake them back up.
Marisa Franco, Ph.D., is affiliated with the University of Maryland and is a policy fellow at Millennium Challenge.
Originally published at WebMD
