My mom has always been my biggest cheerleader. During the pandemic, I didn’t see her for many months, and I missed her. When she was able to travel, she braved a long cross-country trip to spend quality time with me and my family. It didn’t go as planned. I was impatient when she needed help with her phone. We couldn’t agree on what to eat for dinner. She accidentally broke a vase. She’d often quoted her beloved grandmother: “Visitors are like fish — after three days, they stink.” By the end of the visit, she joked that she’d proved it.
Amid a national loneliness crisis, many people believe that more contact is the key to connection. Teens commit to daily Snap streaks with their friends. Colleagues try to get closer through regular happy hours. Former roommates meet up for brunch every Sunday. And parents clamor for nightly calls with their adult kids.
Being in constant communication can be nice, but it can also create a lot of pressure — on ourselves and others — and a lot of opportunities to be offended when lapses occur.
Research reveals that the frequency of interaction does not determine the quality of a relationship. As one viral social media post put it, “true friendship is allowing a certain level of ghosting to go unmentioned.” In fact, time apart can actually bring us closer together.
After leaving for college, kids often get along better with their parents and their siblings. Once parents aren’t hovering and nagging and siblings aren’t borrowing clothes without asking, they fight less and have more meaningful discussions. It’s true at work too: From software to sales, the most productive, creative and resourceful teams don’t interact in steady streams. They alternate between periods of low communication and surges of high communication.
Absence really can make the heart grow fonder. Distance enables us to reconcile, rejuvenate and reinvent. After winning three N.B.A. championships with the Lakers, Phil Jackson left, describing Kobe Bryant as uncoachable. When Mr. Jackson returned a year later, they were able to mend fences, put their egos aside, transform the team’s offense and win two more titles, even without Shaquille O’Neal. Or take the band Fall Out Boy: After struggling with burnout, the members went their separate ways. When they regrouped four years later, it was with refreshed energy and a renewed vision for shifting their sound from punk to pop with a hip-hop slant. They ended up eclipsing their prior success, producing three straight chart-topping albums and their most streamed single ever. “The break cleared my palate so I could plug in to the new form,” the drummer explained. The lead vocalist reflected, “It’s almost like the whole hiatus was to help the band.”
According to the data, most people can spend up to 75 percent of their time alone without feeling lonely. Some relationships require more recurring conversation than others. If you talk to your significant other only once a month, you’re on the path to having an insignificant other. And if you catch up with high school or college friends only every five or 10 years at reunions, your relationships might become frozen in the past. To prevent our ties from fraying, we need new rituals for making intermittent interaction more meaningful.
Continuing a Snap streak doesn’t bolster bonds, but there’s another kind of digital communication that can. It’s called pebbling, named after a ritual that some penguins use to court potential mates. They collect and present smooth, shiny stones that are appealing and suitable for building a nest together. The digital equivalent of pebbling is exchanging memes, links or reels. It’s not about spamming each other with random junk from the internet, but rather sending little things that remind you of each other, or that might be of special interest. The content may not be weighty, but the act is significant — each pebble is a bid for connection. It signals “I’m thinking of you.”
Research shows that pebbling helps us solidify and sustain relationships, especially with people we don’t know well. What makes it meaningful is that it’s personal. It’s moving to send a video they’ll love; it’s bonding to share one you both love. And either one can be a prelude to actual conversations.
When I reconnected with a college pal after a decade of distance, I was stunned that she remembered my favorite movie. It conveyed that I mattered to her. That kind of little memory flex can go a long way. So can a brief message of care.
Remarkably, there’s evidence that after patients with mental health challenges are discharged from hospitals, getting short, periodic notes from staff is enough to cut their suicide risk by as much as half — and that holds true whether the patients are in California, Iran or Australia. Those relationships aren’t friendships, but the lesson is the same: Small, sporadic touch points can make a big difference. One patient wrote, “You will never know what your little notes mean to me. I always think someone cares about what happens to me, even if my family did kick me out. I am really grateful.”
Small gestures can nurture ties. But the best way to strengthen them is to make new memories together. Psychologists find that when people take a trip to a haunted house, the more fear they face, the closer they become, if they process it together afterward. That turns the experience into a unique moment they’ve shared. The same goes for singing, dancing, family video games and martial arts rituals: These shared activities aren’t a substitute for getting to know someone deeply, but sweating and cheering are social lubricants. The more we feel together, the faster we bond together.
Too busy for karaoke? Try admin night, where friends hang out together while powering through their most tedious tasks. Steve Martin, Martin Short and Tom Hanks have their own version of transforming personal discomfort into shared fun: colonoscopy parties, at which they watch comedy and play poker while prepping for the procedure. I’ve heard of friend groups that stay in touch across continents by holding a New Year’s Eve reunion party. An annual trip together can do more to maintain closeness than a quarterly dinner.
Reaching out to someone you’re not in regular contact with can be daunting. In a series of studies, people were as reluctant to contact old friends as they were to write to strangers. After hundreds of people drafted texts and emails to reconnect, less than a third ended up sending them. They wanted to, but worried that since their friendships had fizzled, their overtures would be unwelcome. They were wrong: In 90 percent of cases, people found reconnecting to be fun. And if people were randomly assigned to reconnect by phone or video call, their ties got stronger than if they emailed or texted — and the interaction wasn’t any more awkward. The care hormone oxytocin is more likely to be released when we hear people’s voices than when we read their messages.
Sustaining relationships seems harder than it really is. When we accept that strong attachments can exist without regular interaction, we can take the pressure off, and stop fretting about whether too long has passed. After all, even chimps and bonobos appear to recognize friends they haven’t seen in years.
My mom and I don’t talk every day, but we’ve started a tradition of calling while we play online Scrabble together, and I look forward to every game. A vibe is not about the frequency of communication; it’s about the depth of connection.
Source photograph by blackCAT/Getty Images.
Dr. Grant, a contributing Opinion writer, is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World,” from which this article is adapted.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Scientific Case for Being Less in Touch With Your Friends appeared first on New York Times.
