Ten years of inches

Look at the list from chapter 1 in a different way. Not the eleven open messages, but the names further back, the ones with no open message because the last one was two years ago. The friend from the first job. The couple you went on holiday with. The one from the antenatal group. You didn't fall out with any of them. You liked them all. And you'd struggle to say when they stopped being people you saw and became people you were fond of.

That's the thinned list, and everyone over thirty has one. What I want to say about it is that the friends on it can't be replaced, and the delay treats them as if they could. Hall's study of people who'd moved somewhere new found that closeness tracked hours together, and the hours weren't small. Making a friend takes time you mostly had in your twenties and don't have now. Roberts and Dunbar's work on phone records found that a large share of the people we're in contact with are transient by nature, in and out of our lives within a year or two, and that the ones who stay can be picked out early by how much contact there is. The friends on your thinned list weren't transient. They'd stayed. They'd got past the point where most contacts fall away, and then they went, by inches, for lack of a line.

A new friend at forty-five is possible and it's rarer and it takes hours. An old friend brought back takes one message and an afternoon, because the hours were already spent, years ago, and they're still there under the stretch. That's the arithmetic that makes the pick-up in chapter 21 worth more than almost anything else in this book. You're not building. You're reopening something already built, and the cost of the reopening is a line.

Ten years of inches is also ten years of practice. The habit of leaving messages doesn't stay with the messages. It becomes the way you handle people who aren't in front of you, and it teaches the people around you what to expect, and what to expect is a slow reply or none. The reputation is small and it's real and it's fixable, because reputations follow behaviour, and two lines today for a month changes what people expect faster than you'd think.

I'm not asking you to work through the thinned list. Most of it can stay as it is, fond and quiet, and that's a fine thing for a list to be. I'm asking you to notice that it was made of days like today, so that today can go differently for the eleven who are still asking.