Long Friendships
A friendship that survives a move has been converted into a different format
Distance does not end friendships; it removes the format they were running on. What replaces it has to be built deliberately, and…
Vivaan Talwar
Contributing writer, Grab My Heart
Vivaan writes about long-distance friendship and the phone calls that keep it alive.
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14 articles
Long Friendships
Voice notes solved a problem that text and email could not
The gap between a message and a phone call was where most long-distance friendships were dying. What the voice message actually…
Long Friendships
Annual contact is a real relationship with an honest name
Some friendships settle at once a year and stay there for decades. Whether that is a failure or a format depends entirely on what…
Long Friendships
The friend with children and the friend without
One of the most common ways an adult friendship fails is a divergence neither person chose. What actually causes the drift, beyond…
Loneliness & Belonging
Weak ties do a job that close friends cannot
The barista, the neighbour, the person at the desk opposite. Brief regular contact with people you barely know has effects that…
Long Friendships
Reunions work when the date is fixed a long way ahead
Annual gatherings of scattered friends succeed or fail on structure rather than enthusiasm. What the ones that survive twenty years…
Long Friendships
What you owe an old friend you have little in common with
Some friendships survive on history alone, and both people know it. Whether that is worth keeping depends on what you think the…
Long Friendships
Friendships that outlast the reason they started
You met through a job, a course, a shared house or a baby group. What determines whether the friendship survives the removal of the…
Loneliness & Belonging
Men's friendships thin out in a fairly predictable way
A pattern shows up often enough to be worth describing: plenty of company in early adulthood, then a narrowing that nobody planned.…
Loneliness & Belonging
You can be surrounded by people all day and still be lonely
Loneliness is not a headcount. It is the gap between the contact you have and the contact you need, which is why busy households…
Long Friendships
In every long-distance friendship one person does more of the travelling
It is rarely discussed and almost always true. The imbalance usually has practical causes, and it damages the friendship mainly…
Long Friendships
Missing the funerals and the birthdays is what distance actually costs
The daily contact can be replaced with calls and messages. The occasions cannot, and it is the accumulation of absences that…
Long Friendships
A very old friendship is partly a relationship with your own past
Somebody who has known you for thirty years is holding a record nobody else has. That is a real asset, and it explains why losing…
Long Friendships
The years when you have nothing to report to an old friend
Contact often thins during the flat periods rather than the busy ones. Having no news feels like having no reason to call, which is…