Staying in Touch

I’m sitting here amidst boxes and garbage bags, loading up a moving pod and heading diagonally across the US on Thursday. Last week, as I prepared for this, I was gripped with a sudden fear that maybe I wouldn’t make any friends in the place that was meant to be my future home. The idea was patently absurd–I’d deepened three relatively new friendships right here in Cambridge last week, why on earth would this ability suddenly disappear? And as I reflected more, I realised that my fear was being assuaged by a feeling better than logic–the feeling that I could trust myself to retain friendships already made.

I’ve lived away from my important people since the age of nine, at which time I started studying at a boarding school that was a 48 hour train-and-bus journey away from my parents’ home in Delhi. I then came to a whole new country for college, a thousand dollar plane ride away from most of my family and school friends. In the years since college, predictably, my friends from both school and college have moved across the globe. And of course, friends made in grad school–from my program as well as field courses and conferences–have dispersed far and wide too, that being a hallmark of academia. Yet at this point, I count among my closest friends people from all of these life stages. How have we managed to do this?

I’m going to try to list and discuss below some of the lessons I’ve learnt from a lifetime of long distance communication, some pitfalls and some tricks that work. I’m sure that other people have different/better approaches–feel free to share them in the comments, I’d love to expand my repertoire! But as evidenced by the fact that I had people from all of my life stages, from elementary school to grad school, at my Ph.D. defence party, I’m clearly doing an okay job at this, and hopefully you’ll find this helpful 🙂

Basal to all these tips, though (yay phylogeny pun!), is the idea that we can stay in touch at two levels–day-to-day happenings, and thoughts and feelings. These aren’t neatly divisible, of course, and they need each other for context and understanding. But it is worth recognizing them as different, to ensure that you’re having conversations that pertain to both. Moreover, different people balance these two facets of emotional intimacy differently, and discovering what balance you both need is important. Which leads to the first suggestion:

• Customize everything: no two friendships are alike. Some friends like regular, brief updates, others hate them. Some friends love setting aside three hours to skype with you, others don’t want to, or can’t. Some friends can plunge back into talking about their deepest vulnerabilities minutes after you start talking, others take many minutes of shallower conversation before they can open up. The more aware you are of their friendship needs and yours, the more easily you can know what it means to maintain this friendship. I often get into trouble when I set external standards–“oh we haven’t talked in six months, are we even still friends?”. Yes, yes we might be, if we can retain what’s important to us–for me, it’s the potential for emotional vulnerability–in the context of however much we communicate. And take your own needs seriously–not wanting to talk except maybe once every six months doesn’t necessarily make you a “bad” friend.
• Work hard: set aside time to nurture friendships in the ways that your mutual needs require. Be intentional about prioritizing friendship in general, or specific friendships at specific times. Maintain a mix, if possible, of near- and far-distance friends, and don’t keep these walled off from one another. I find that it helps newer near-friendships to feel the depth of your older friendships, and it helps older far-friendships to stay up to date with your current emotional landscape.
• Embrace social media: disabuse yourself of this notion that connection through social media isn’t “real.” Any communication is as real or fake as you make it to be. And as a subset of the first point above, different friendships need different modes of communication, and combinations thereof. One friend and I communicate exclusively through email, but each chain, started maybe once every few months, runs 30 messages long. Another–Facebook posts for updates, and Twitter direct messages for conversation. Another friend–exclusively Gchat. Another–Instagram for updates, and Whatsapp for conversation. One friend sends me postcards and I respond with Whatsapp messages. Another–just phone calls. Another–twitter lurking + phone calls. This array of options can lead to weird asymmetries, which makes it important to be open about the fact that you follow friends on social media. Many people are embarrassed to admit to lurking on social media, but it isn’t bad to want to know what your friends are up to! For example, I rarely post on Instagram, but lurk there. So I may start conversations with friends who update using Instagram with “I saw your post on Instagram! …(insert thought/question)…” At the start of long-distance friendships, it may take some figuring out what works best, before you fall into some communication ritual that feels right to you.
• Reach out to people when you think of them, even if it’s been ages since you’ve talked. More often than not, people like maintaining connections, so try to trust that they want to hear from you. But on the flip side (and I’m learning this the hard way), the amount of communication different people want/need/can sustain is wildly different, so try to be mindful of those needs–no fixed amount of communication is “correct”. On another flip side, try to be that person whom people feel okay about getting in touch with out of the blue. I try to be effusive in this context, and offer shallow or deep updates of my own, so that folks realise that we can get back in touch if they want to.
• Be okay with change: when you’re in the game of maintaining years-long friendships from far away, things are going to change, or have already changed and you didn’t know about it because you’re far away. For a long time I found it hard to accept that, after years of someone being a certain kind of friend, they may become an entirely different kind of friend or maybe not stay a friend at all. But remember that this can go in any direction–I’ve had some friendships stay dormant and shallow for years before suddenly becoming deeper, because shit happens and people reach out to you, or you reach out to them, and you both value connection.

That’s all I’ve got from 20 years of staying in touch from far away. I’ll update/make this a series if I end up having more thoughts!