"It's their turn"

Somewhere in your head there's a tally. You might not admit to keeping one, but you could tell me, for most of your friends, who got in touch last and who usually does the arranging. When the tally says it's their turn, getting in touch feels like giving something away. It feels like admitting that you need them more than they need you.

I'd like to look at what the tally is for and whether it's doing its job.

Its purpose is to protect you from one-sided friendships. That's a real thing. There are people who take, who only appear when they want something, and who'd let you do all the work for ever. A rough sense of whether effort flows both ways is a sensible thing to have.

But the tally measures only one kind of effort, which is who starts things. It treats starting things as the sign of caring. Those aren't the same. Think about your own friends. Some people are starters. They organise, suggest and send the first message, and they do it with everyone because that's how they are. Other people almost never start anything and are warm, loyal and delighted to be asked. They'd drive two hours to help you move. They remember your mother's name and ask after her. They don't initiate, out of shyness or habit or the same hesitation this book is about. If you wait for a non-starter to start, you'll wait indefinitely, and you'll have concluded something false about how much they care.

I know of no research that sorts people into those two groups, so this is my observation. But I'd be surprised if you couldn't sort your own friends that way in a minute or two. You may also notice that the non-starters include some of the people you'd most like to see.

The Aknin and Sandstrom finding from chapter 3 bears on this. If fewer than a third of willing people will send a message to an old friend even with everything made easy, then starting is hard for most people. If you're able to do it, you have something most of them lack. Whoever finds it least hard might as well be the one to do it, as the better cook in a house tends to do more of the cooking. There's no indignity in that.

The honest objection runs like this. "So I'm supposed to do all the work for ever, and never mind whether they'd ever bother with me?" No. There's a better test of a friendship than whose turn it is, and it has two parts. When you do get in touch, are they glad? And when you arrange something, do they turn up and seem pleased to be there? If the answer to both is yes, the friendship is mutual in every way that matters. You put in the first thirty seconds, and they match everything after. They listen and laugh, and they remember and care. The first thirty seconds is a small price for that.

If the answer is no, that's different. Suppose your messages get short replies, and plans get cancelled or never quite fixed. Suppose that when you do meet, the interest runs one way. Then you've learned something true, and you learned it by making the first move. The tally could never have told you. Chapter 14 suggests a simple limit. Make two good attempts, some weeks apart, and then let it rest without a grudge.

What the tally mostly protects is pride. Pride does no harm when it's kept in proportion. A friendship is a lot to pay for it, though. Your friend isn't at home thinking that you've surrendered by messaging first. Nobody keeps score of that. If they think about it at all, it'll be "I'm so glad they got in touch, I've been meaning to for ages."