Let’s Keep in Touch…?

I emerge from my hiatus to write about something very important to me: connection. “Connection is why we’re here; it gives purpose and meaning to our lives.” That’s from Brené Brown, a renowned researcher on human relationships and emotion. My therapist recommended her TED Talks to me, and now I recommend them to all of you. She may look like a Karen, but she’s great.

So, connection. What does that mean? For most of us, it means love among family and friends, having someone you can speak to any time, any day about life’s intricacies and pitfalls. While you can have a connection to a place or an object, you can only have a connection with people, because true connection is a mutual understanding. And while true connection is strong while it lasts, it’s also fickle, and we have to work really hard to maintain it.

When we are young—like, really young—friendship is easy. You’re having a birthday party? Invite the whole class, boys and girls. In school, you’re automatically friends with your three classroom tablemates, just by stealing one another’s Foohy erasers. When the soccer team hangs out, it’s all the girls, all the siblings, all the parents… everyone gets a chance to forge these connections.

But with each and every year of our lives, friendships are harder to find, and when we do find them, harder to hang onto. Especially for girls. Boys, you have no idea. Girls are über selective about who they hang out with, and the simplest thing can leave you discarded. But I digress. Friendships in high school are easy to seek out (if not keep) when you see these people every day for years.

College is where the effort really starts. Suddenly, for the first time in our lives, we are forced to actively reach out to friends from our past even when we have no clue the next time we will meet. We have to check in, say hello, send a happy birthday, let them know we are thinking of them because we passed that store we always used to talk about or were reminded of a laugh we shared.

Truth be told, maintaining these friendships is one of the most frustrating aspects of adulthood. Because, like I said, it needs to be mutual. I can text someone every year on her birthday to no reply, or a “thanks” and silence, and that’s not a connection. It can be quite sad, because there are people from growing up, from high school and college—people we considered great, close friends—who suddenly had an easy way to let relationships fall by the wayside. I am sure we can all pinpoint these lost connections.

Be the person to randomly text “how are you,” or “you just popped into my head and wanted to say hi,” or “happy birthday.” Those conversations may not go anywhere, but I am of the opinion that just making this slight effort reads as a bigger effort, considering how much easier it is to just, well, not text.

Some of these quick check-ins have led to rekindled relationships. But this is rare. Most of the time, the conversations end with, “let me know when you’re in the city and we’ll grab a coffee.” And then life gets in the way. We’re all busy, I get it, but I think it says a lot about a person to mean what you write. No?

Here’s what I am trying to say. You are not going to have too many people in your life who you can call true, close friends. When you find them, you cannot let distance call time of death. You cannot get lazy. It may seem like a great effort to “keep in touch,” but it will be worth it when you have someone to turn to or to meet up with when you are visiting a new city.

In the good olde days, long stretches of time without contact were normal, even among strong connections. Constant communication was just not possible. But these days, each relationship is weighted with the knowledge that when you think of someone, you can let them know in seconds. So silence reads as forgetting about or disliking. It’s easy to take this to heart.

Be the one to break this silence. Make someone happy by bringing a long-lost name onto their lock screens in the morning. You never know what will happen. In the words of the Girl Scouts, “make new friends, but keep the old…” Maybe that song should end like this: “though none will last if you let them grow cold.” And then, all told, you’ll be old, and growing mold, with no one to hold. Ok, I’m done. But seriously.

Oh, and PS, if you are in the NYC area or planning to be, and would like to meet up for a real, in-person coffee, you know what to do.