Do you tell your friends you miss them?

And other strategies for staying close while apart

I work from home on Wednesdays. So only the cat clocked the tears when they started mid-morning on an otherwise unremarkable weekday. I could blame the black coffee I drank on an empty stomach. Or the follicular phase of my cycle. But I think I know what triggered the feelings to form in my tear ducts and land on the keys of my laptop.

The poet Hollie McNish was on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to promote her new book. Predictably enough, it was her rendition of a poem about friendship that got me. In a performance lasting 90 seconds, she articulated immaculately an ache I’ve felt for myself while spending a Friday in front of a film when I would rather have been cackling around a friend’s kitchen table. The working title was ‘poem written one night when I was really missing some of my friends’. It stuck.

The miss-course

‘My friends are scattered across cities now,’ she began, using a verb that applies to my own social circle. ‘I just wish you were closer. I just wish you would knock on my door while I’m sleeping, throw a stone at my window and wake me so we can sit on the pavement and talk about nothing and everything and throw balls at the curb and never have left. The comfort of friends I can talk about anything to. I miss you.’ Oof.

It isn’t the only piece of popular culture to enter the miss-you-discourse. The ‘m’ word also decorates the artwork of a newly launched podcast about a transatlantic friendship. In Miss Me, Lily Allen and her childhood friend, the broadcaster Miquita Oliver, take a trip down memory lane in a bid to stem the separation anxiety they endure while living on opposite ends of the Atlantic.

With those three words, all have hit upon a phrase that feels harder to articulate than most without the levity of alcohol or emojis. And by committing their disgruntlement with distance to the public record, they aren’t just missing their mates, they’re telling them. It’s an interesting strategy in an era when friendship has well and truly gone global. And yet, in a culture in which your platonic love language is more likely to be rooted in rinsing each other than it is earnest declarations, do you do it?

Public displays of reflection

What I call telling my mates I miss them, Dr Amy Janan Johnson calls delivering assurances. ‘Or ways of telling the person how important they are,’ she shares, from her office in the communications department of the University of Oklahoma, where she works as a professor. ‘I miss you’ is one assurance; ‘I love you’, another. ‘It’s anything that intentionally says: “This relationship is important to me”. It’s not assuming that they know but intentionally laying it out for them.’

Like mine, Amy’s platonic curiosity was born of self-interest. Or, to borrow a phrase from the journalist Rhaina Cohen, me-search. Aged 21, Amy moved 1,000 miles away from her home in Georgia to Michigan. It was the early noughties, and amid a technological revolution that would deliver to us new connective verbs every few years (texting, tweeting, tagging) the definition of distance was being regularly redefined – along with its relational significance.

‘Back then, there was a claim in the academic literature that distance was dead; that with smartphones, it no longer mattered how far away you lived because you could have your network throughout the world.’ And with the ability to conduct a conversation from anywhere, came an expectation for you to do so. ‘But one of the things the research has shown is that even with smartphones, there remains a difference in how people interact through those spaces.’  She gives the example of nonverbal cues. ‘You might think that talking on Zoom, you’d be able to see each other’s non-verbals really well, but one reason people tend to interrupt each other on Zoom calls is because you can’t see the micro-expressions that people use when they interact.’

Fast-forward to today and distance is, if not fatal to friendship, then a condition that requires careful attention. Social circles are made up of relationships of choice, half of which - according to one study - are replaced every seven years. It makes their demise inherently difficult to study. But in self-reported research into why friendships fracture, distance is frequently cited. In a global study of 30,000 people by Snapshat, designed to take the temperature of friendship, more than half said moving to a new city had had a negative impact on their friendships, with almost as many saying the same thing of their friends who moved to a different part of the same city.  

Call of duty

That our screentime stats are eye-watering enough come Saturday morning is one reason we may not be falling over ourselves to FaceTime our international friends, but it isn’t the only reason distance represents a barrier. Somewhere between the scheduling of phone calls and the playing of WhatsApp catchup can come the creep of obligation – a feeling that’s antithetical to the very premise of voluntary relationships.

In his 1994 book on the topic, the communication professor William Rowlins identified time-scarcity as the primary culprit for losing friends, with his interviewees talking of having to ‘make the effort’ and ‘find the time’ to see friends who no longer lived nearby. And that was then; the blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure and the increasing demands of modern parenting go some way towards explaining why leisure time has been falling since the seventies - and with it, face time with friends; we now spend just four hours a month socialising, with millennials more likely than other age groups to be seeing less of their friends this year than last.

Even when you do find the time to catch each other up, you’re doing just that: recounting things that have happened without communicating the broader context. Among the repercussions that distance delivers, explains Amy, is a tendency to fall into the nostalgia trap; remembering friends as the people they were before they left, rather than engaging with who they are now – and who they’re becoming. ‘The research has shown that we tend to idolise the people that we don't see face-to-face on a regular basis and this is really apparent in friendship. You may have fond memories of them from the past, but that doesn't mean you’ll automatically stay close if don’t keep up with how the other person is changing.’

Rest assured

On the question of how you do this, Amy is clear; while technology has made long-distance relationships more workable, it doesn’t offer a connective cheat code. And in order to circumnavigate some of the issues that distance creates (a sense of duty, catch-up culture, the nostalgia trap) you need to communicate in ways which enable you to get into the weeds of each other’s lives. ‘Don’t assume that you can stay close via social media or just even texting, but make the time to actually talk to each other one-on-one so that you can be really curious about each other's lives and keep up with the person they are now.’

As for dropping the ‘m’ word? ‘Assurances are one of the maintenance behaviours that you can do pretty easily over distance, but it isn’t one that comes naturally in western cultures,’ she adds, referring to everything from the stiff-upper-lip and relentless piss-taking and even rampant individualism. If assurances feel at odds with your usual comms strategy, it’s just one example of self-disclosure. ‘Self-disclosure remains a huge way of maintaining your relationships – it’s almost definitional in terms of how close you are; your closest friends are the people you tell the most to and that can continue over distance.’ She gives the example of seeking out someone’s perspective on a problem as a way of offering an assurance (I value your opinion) that’s also a form of self-disclosure (this is what I’m going through).

Of course, not all long-distance friendships will go the proverbial. And more than how to stay close, it’s how to be ok with growing apart that Amy considers the most significant learning of a career spent studying the topic. ‘It’s taking a lifespan approach,’ she tells me, on the question of how her me-search has shaped her own friendships. ‘That means looking at how your relationships change over time. So you have people who are only really your friends because they're having a similar situation as you and you have the people who will stand the test of time, who you can call on for support. And with those friends, it doesn’t really matter how far apart you are because they’re going to be in your life.’

It’s a sentiment echoed in my own me-search. ‘It makes you realise which friendships are real and makes you value them even more,’ my friend Eva tells me, over WhatsApp from Paris, where she’s lived for the past decade, before delivering an unprompted assurance. ‘I miss you all terribly, even after 10 years and having a lot of incredible friendships here. Coming from the same place and having shared the same experience is a strong bond that I don’t think I appreciated as much when I was younger.’ We talk about the last time we were all together, passing the babies around the table of a cafe in the north London suburb where we met. ‘Never at the age of 16, when I was trying to be cool, would I have thought that would have been my perfect way to spend lunch.’ Nostalgia: it isn’t always a trap.