Two years ago I wrote about limiting contact with a friend who had become intolerably self-centered. Since then, we’ve fallen into a cadence of a weekly catch up call. After a call last week, I realized, with some chagrin, that once again we spent an entire hour on the phone and never spoke once about anything going on in my life.
As I thought about our calls over the past two years, I recognized that, with few exceptions (like when my furnace died), almost all of our calls have been like this. My next thought was, I don’t like this. Perhaps my friend has become such a self-centered, self-obsessed man that it’s time for both of us to let our friendship go.
We have a friendship that extends nearly 20 years. We probably know each other better than anyone else alive knows either of us. Is that enough to sustain a friendship? I don’t know.
Then it occurred to me that the real problem is that we don’t do anything together. We lives 100s of miles apart. The last time we hung out in person was when I was on a work trip in his city 6 years ago.
Talking on the phone is better than nothing – but it is no substitute for in-person contact. If we were face to face, we’d be doing stuff together instead of only talking. We’d be hiking, fixing things, having meals, playing games, throwing a frisbee – all the things that friends do together.
Phone contact only is like being an online therapist. But, I am not a therapist.
Since neither of us has any plans to move, I think this friendship will continue to fade.
That’s OK though. He has friends in his hometown. I have friends in mine. We’ll both be OK.
We’ll probably still catch up a few times a year and occasionally during exciting times by phone. And if I ever travel back to his city, we’ll grab dinner and enjoy some laughs.
I have two other long term, long distance friends. With both of them, our friendship and the frequency of our calls have naturally diminished over the years.
This, I suspect is how things go.
It also makes me appreciate the loose connections I have made here locally. I look forward to seeing my “regulars” every week. There is something about real-life friendship that is irreplaceable.