What the delay costs you

The book so far has been about the friend's end. This chapter is about yours, because the belief under all of this is that the delay costs you nothing. It costs the friend a little, maybe. It costs you an occasional heavy feeling on a Sunday. Otherwise it's free.

It isn't, and the cost has a shape. Dunbar's review of the research on friendship opens by calling it the single most important factor in health, wellbeing and happiness. That's a large claim from a review, and I'd hold it loosely, but the direction is well supported and I don't know anyone who'd argue the other way. What the delay does, slowly, is reduce the number of people who know what your week was like. That's the first cost, and it's the one you feel least, because it's an absence. The friend who used to know that your mum was ill and the job was wobbling has stopped knowing, not because you decided to stop telling them but because the telling happened in replies and the replies stopped.

The second cost is invitations. Chapter 14 said they go to the people who reply. Over years, the delay moves you from the first list to the second, and the second list is the one that gets the message a week before, when it's already a plan. You'll feel this as people not asking, and you'll read it as people drifting, and it'll be neither. It'll be people planning, with the information they've got, which is that you don't answer.

The third cost is the one that lands in middle age. Ruixue Zhaoyang and colleagues had 173 adults aged twenty to seventy-nine report on their social interactions five times a day for a week. Middle-aged adults gave the lowest ratings of how positive their daily interactions were, lower than the young and lower than the old. That's one study and it's about all interactions, not friendships, and I'm not going to build much on it. But it matches something most people in their forties will recognise, which is that the days fill with interactions that aren't chosen, and the chosen ones, the friends, are the ones that have thinned. The delay is a large part of how they thinned.

And the fourth cost is the Sunday feeling, which you already know about, and which you've been paying every week. Eleven open messages is eleven small weights, each carried every time you open the phone, and none of them heavy enough to do anything about. Add them up over a year and the delay has cost you more attention than the replies would have, which is the strange arithmetic of this habit. You saved the minute and spent the week.