"We'll pick up where we left off"

This belief is the kindest one in the book and the most costly. The friendship is old and solid. You've known each other since school, or the first job, or the flat. You could go a year and meet and it would be as though no time had passed. So the silence doesn't touch the friendship. It just pauses it, and a pause can be ended whenever you like.

Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar studied this in a way that separates the two things it runs together. In one study of 251 women's social networks, they looked at how long it had been since each person last had contact with each friend or relative, and found that the time since last contact tracked emotional closeness closely. The longer since contact, the less close. That was true of friends and of family, but the pattern differed. The costs of keeping up a relationship with family, they conclude, are lower than the costs of keeping up a friendship. In a second study they followed people's whole active networks over eighteen months, across a major change in their lives. Family relationships and friendships behaved strikingly differently. Friendships declined in quality unless effort went into them, and the effort that prevented decline was, for the women in the study, talking together more often, and for the men, doing more together. Debra Oswald and Eddie Clark found the same shape in school best friends going to college. Distance didn't matter. How much they communicated did, and the friendships that lasted were the ones where people kept up the ordinary things, being positive, being supportive, telling each other stuff.

Put the two together and the belief comes apart. Family keeps. You can go a year without ringing your brother and the relationship, whatever its state, is roughly where you left it. Friendship doesn't keep. It's held up by contact and it settles when the contact stops, slowly, without a moment you could point to. The friend from school you haven't spoken to in a year isn't paused. They're a little further off than they were, and the meeting when it comes will be warm and slightly effortful, and you'll both say it's as though no time has passed, and then another year will pass.

A garden left for a season isn't ruined, and it isn't waiting either. It's gone a little back to what it was before anyone tended it. That's all the stretch does, and it does it every week.

I'm not telling you to be afraid of this. I'm telling you the pause isn't free, and the belief that it is has cost you friends you'd have kept for a line a month.