I think that one of the hardest things to cope with is when friends move away. You don’t stop being friends; good friendships will last through all sorts of things. But what can be hard is keeping in touch, and keeping up the same level and intensity. Friendships work differently when your regular mode of communication is over the phone or email. Especially email. Email can be a killer in terms of the effect it has on you when dealing with your friends.
Don’t believe me?
Like many people I have three or four really close friends, but all of them have moved away so we keep in touch by email and meet up when we can. I’m no stranger to this form of communicating with my friends. For some of them, we’ve been using email for twenty years to keep in touch. For us, email is the vital glue that keeps our friendships together.
One of my closest friends used to email me every day. In fact, we had an unwritten pact that if we didn’t hear from each other within forty-eight hours that we’d start ringing the alarm bells and calling the authorities. Today, we talk less often. Sometimes months go by without us talking - we both have partners and jobs and lives to deal with. Despite this, we usually manage to keep each other up to date with what is going on in our respective, hectic, lives. Over the years though, through our irregular email there is nothing we haven’t discussed, nothing we haven’t shared.
Sometimes we lapse back into the old habits of regular, daily, emails. Suddenly the closeness, the sharing, the immediacy of having a friend right there is back, as if she never left. She may as well be sitting next to me.
And then I send her an email and I don’t get a reply.
An hour later and there’s still no email. It doesn’t take along before that part of my brain associated with my friend starts thinking:
What did I do?
What did I say?
Did I offend her somehow?
Did I ask a question she didn’t like?
Is she OK?
Should I be calling someone?
You are probably thinking that I’m over analyzing the situation, and you are probably right, but this is the problem with email. It de-sensitizes your communication to the bare words, and leaves far too much to the vagaries of time.
