How to keep a long-distance friendship alive

By one estimate, it takes more than 200 hours together to turn someone into a close friend, after roughly 50 to reach casual friendship and 90 to become a friend. (Those hour figures come from the University of Kansas's news release on Jeffrey Hall's study of new friendships; the paper's abstract doesn't state them.) If your closest friend has just moved to Toronto or Dubai, you two have banked far more than that.

The hours don't vanish when the removal van leaves. But a friendship isn't a savings account either. It needs some deposits to stay open.

Does distance end friendships?

Less than you'd fear, if you keep talking. Two studies followed friendships through a big move:

• Communication mattered; distance didn't. Researchers tracked high school best friendships through the first year of college. On average they declined in satisfaction and commitment, but proximity didn't influence the friendships, while how much the friends communicated did. The pairs who stayed best friends did more of the everyday upkeep, and keeping the best friendship appeared to buffer them from social loneliness.
• Friends need more upkeep than family. Following 25 students for 18 months as they left school for university, Roberts and Dunbar found that emotional closeness in friendships was more sensitive than in family relationships to less frequent contact and fewer shared activities. Their conclusion: friendships take more effort to maintain than family ties.

Both studies involved young people starting university (one of them very small), so the details may differ for a thirty-something moving for work. The pattern is still useful. Your mum will forgive six months of silence. A friend may simply drift.

What actually keeps a friendship going

In a study that built a measure of how friends maintain their friendships, four behaviours came out as the key ones: positivity, supportiveness, openness and interaction. Best friends did more of all four than close or casual friends. In pairs, each person's own effort predicted how satisfied and committed the pair felt, so it takes both of you.

Here's what each looks like with a time difference in the way:

The supportiveness row is the easiest to fake and the one people notice most. A calendar reminder that says "Ask Sam about the flat viewing" isn't cold. It's how you stay in someone's week when you're not in their city.

Have a recurring "thing"

Hall's study of new friendships found that time spent hanging out, joking around and playing video games built closeness, while hours spent working together didn't count as much. It's about making friends, not keeping them, but the lesson carries over: a friendship that's become pure news updates has lost that hanging-out time. A recurring shared thing brings it back.

Pick something that's easy to keep up and give it a name:

• A show, one episode a week. Watch separately if your schedules don't line up, then send a voice note reaction. The rule that nobody watches ahead is half the fun.
• A book club of two. One book a month, one call to argue about it.
• Game night. An online board game, a word game you play turn by turn all week, or a co-op game on a call.
• Same run, same morning. Both do the same distance on Saturday and compare times and complaints.
• A shared playlist you both add to, with a rule that every addition comes with one line of why.
• A yearly trip that's always yours: same weekend, alternating who picks the place.

If your thing is a film or a game on a call, a Couch room for two keeps the same link every week, with games like Ludo or Co-op Sudoku built in.

Small, regular contact counts more than you think

You don't need long calls to stay close. In three experiments involving more than 900 people, those asked to have just one intentional conversation with a friend that day, whether catching up, joking around, showing care, listening or giving a sincere compliment (among seven options), reported higher well-being that evening than people in the control groups. The authors concluded that as little as one such exchange with one friend in a day can help.

At a distance, voice notes do this job well:

• Keep them short. Two or three minutes. A twelve-minute monologue becomes homework.
• Reply to something specific. "Wait, go back to the bit about your landlord" is better than "haha same".
• Record on a walk. It sounds like you're there, and it uses dead time.
• Send a photo of something that reminded you of them, with one line. It costs ten seconds and says "you're still in my head".

The trap is turning it into an obligation where every message needs a reply by bedtime. If that's started to happen, how often to talk when you're apart covers why the pressure backfires and how to reset it.

Make visits about hanging out

Visits are expensive, so there's a pull to fill them with sightseeing. Resist some of it. The friendship lives in the slow parts: cooking, a lazy breakfast, walking nowhere in particular, the conversation at 1 a.m.

• Stay with them if you can. You'll see their real life, not a hotel version.
• Meet their new people. It makes their stories make sense afterwards, and makes you part of their life there.
• Alternate who travels, or meet halfway somewhere neither of you lives.
• Set the next one before you leave, even if it's "sometime in spring".

When one of you moved and the other stayed

These feel different, and naming the difference helps. The one who moved is buried in new everything: job, flat, people, bureaucracy. The one who stayed has the same life with a hole in it. Each can feel forgotten by the other.

If you stayed:

I know you're drowning in new stuff and I'm not keeping score.
I just miss you. Could we set up something regular,
even a voice note on Sundays, so I'm not wondering
whether to message or wait?

If you moved:

I'm sorry I've been rubbish at keeping in touch. It's not
that I've forgotten you. Everything here takes so much energy.
Can we find one thing we do regularly that's easy for both of us?

Let it change shape

Not every friendship will stay at the same closeness after a move, and that's not a failure. A best friend you talked to every day can become the friend you speak to every few weeks and still pick up with instantly. In Roberts and Dunbar's study, closeness fell as contact fell. What you control is whether that happens by choice or by accident.

If you sense it slipping, say so before it's gone:

I've noticed we've gone quiet, and I don't want us to
drift by accident. I know life's different now.
What would actually work for you?

And if you've been the only one reaching out for a long time, it's fine to stop chasing. Leave the door open with a warm message, and let them walk through it if they want to.

Key takeaways

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• In one study of high school best friends in their first year of college, proximity didn't influence how the friendships fared, but how much the friends communicated did.
• Friendships lose closeness faster than family ties when contact drops, so they need active, two-way upkeep.
• Positivity, support, openness and doing things together are the behaviours linked to lasting friendships; remember the dates that matter to them.
• A named, recurring shared thing and short, regular contact like voice notes do more than occasional long catch-ups.
• Spend visits hanging out, alternate who travels, and let the friendship change shape rather than letting it drift by accident.