Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, which is leaving a friend's message for a better moment, and then a better one, until the moment has gone and so, a little, has the friend. Nobody decides this. You like the person. You meant to reply. You still mean to. And the friendship is thinner than it was a year ago, and thinner than it will be next year, because of a delay that felt like nothing each time it happened.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the delay makes sense from the inside. The message deserved a proper answer, you didn't have the time or the head for one, and a quick line felt like short-changing someone you care about. The second is that the proper answer is the problem. It's a standard, not a task, and standards don't get done, they get postponed. Meanwhile the friend on the other end sees the same silence you'd see, and reads it the way you'd read it. There's research on how much people appreciate being contacted, on how friendships decay without contact and on what people make of a slow reply, and it points one way. The third is practical. Two lines today does the whole job. A better reply next month does none of it. Chapters 19 to 22 cover how, and none of it takes longer than a minute.

This book isn't about friendships you've ended on purpose, or people you've stepped back from because of how they treated you. A delay that's really a decision is a different thing, and you're allowed to make it. And if the problem isn't that you leave messages but that nobody sends them, and you're waiting for other people to get in touch while the weeks go quiet, that's the earlier book Ring them first, which starts further back than this one.

Two cautions.

If you've stopped answering everyone, not just the friends who can wait, and it comes with feeling low most of the day for a fortnight or more, the NHS lists avoiding contact with friends among the symptoms of depression and says to see a GP. Do that first. Messages can wait until you have.

If replying is hard because any contact makes you anxious, and you've been turning down invitations for years because of nerves rather than time, the earlier book Go anyway is about that, and chapter 23 here says a little more.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.