Waiting for them to get in touch

Nobody decides to lose touch. It happens through a series of perfectly reasonable non-decisions: it is their turn, they are busy, it has been a while now and getting in touch would be a whole thing. Each one is defensible on its own. The sum of them is a quiet year.

The belief doing the most damage is the scoreboard — the idea that contact is a debt alternating between two people, and that ringing when it is not your turn is slightly undignified. Almost nobody on the other end is keeping that score. They are doing exactly what you are doing, for exactly the same reasons, and the silence you are each reading as indifference is the same silence.

Then there is the length of it, which reverses on you. Two weeks needs no explanation. Two years feels like it needs one, so you do not call, so it becomes three. The book's answer is that the explanation you are dreading is one sentence long, and that the other person's reaction to hearing from you after two years is almost never the one you have rehearsed.

There is a second book here about what happens once you are talking — the half-listening you do while assembling your reply, and why people slowly stop telling you things. And a third about asking for help, which is the same problem with higher stakes.