"I haven't got time for friends right now"

There are seasons when this is nearly true. A new baby. A parent who's ill. A job that has taken the year. In those seasons the open messages pile up faster than usual and the meaning-to becomes a kind of holding pattern, and you tell yourself the friends will understand, and they mostly will. But look at what the belief claims, because it's larger than the season.

It claims that the delay is where the time goes. Jeffrey Hall followed people who'd recently moved somewhere new, and first-year students over nine weeks, and found that the hours spent together, and the time spent on leisure rather than chores, went with how close people became. Friendship takes hours. That part of the belief is right, and Dunbar's review of the friendship research puts it the same way, that making and keeping friends is costly in time. But the hours Hall is talking about are hours together. They're the drink, the walk, the weekend in October. They're not the reply. The reply is a minute, and the delay doesn't save the minute. It spends the minute several times over, every time you open the message, feel the small weight of it and close it again.

Here's what I think actually happens in the busy season. You haven't got hours for the drink, which is fair. So you don't reply to the message about the drink, because the reply would have to say no, or not yet, and that feels worse than saying nothing. And the message stays open, and the friend reads the silence as chapter 4 describes, and when the season ends and you do have hours, the friend has stopped asking. The delay didn't protect the friendship through a busy time. It let the friendship go quiet during the one stretch when a line would have held it.

The line for a busy season is short and honest. "Can't this month, it's all gone to pot here, but ask me again in March." That's fifteen seconds and it keeps the friend on the list, and the friend will ask again in March, because you told them to. Nothing in that needs an hour. What needed an hour was the proper reply, and the proper reply was never coming in this season or any other.

So separate the two claims. You may not have time for friends right now, in the sense of hours. You always have time for the reply, because the reply doesn't take any. And the reply is the thing that decides whether the friends are still there when the hours come back.