How to keep in touch with friends

Keeping in touch as a child took no effort, because you all sat in the same room. Then school ended, jobs started, people moved, and it turned into something you have to do on purpose. Nobody teaches you that part. Most of us just assume friendships will look after themselves, right up to the day we realise they didn’t.

You don’t need a big system. You need to know who matters to you, a rough idea of how often, and something that catches you when time gets away.

Decide who you want to keep

You can’t stay close to everyone you’ve ever liked, and trying is what makes people give up. Write down the names that would make you sad to lose. For most people that’s somewhere between five and fifteen.

Then give each one a rough rhythm. Your best friend might be every week or two, an old flatmate every couple of months. There’s no correct number. Our guide to how often to talk to your friends goes through how to choose, and it’s fine to get it wrong and change it later.

Say yes to small contact as well. A photo, a voice note or a “this made me think of you” all count. When you only allow yourself the big catch-up, it never happens.

After you move

A move takes away all the contact you never had to plan: the drink after work, the bump in the supermarket. So plan a little. Choose the two or three people you most want to keep, and agree on something regular, like a call on the first Sunday of the month. Time zones make this harder, and voice notes help because you don’t both have to be awake.

When you’re the one who left, the first months are full of people asking how it’s going. It tends to go quiet after that, and that’s when it’s worth writing first. We have a page for people who moved abroad, and a longer guide on keeping a long distance friendship with what actually helps once you’re apart.

After college

University friendships are built on being around each other all the time, and graduation ends that in one week. Everyone scatters to different cities with new jobs, and the group chat keeps going for a while on memes alone.

A yearly trip works surprisingly well for these groups, if someone is willing to book it. Choose the date before you all leave the last one. For the people you were closest to, don’t rely on the group: write to them directly. Our page on friends scattered after university has more on this. The same goes for friendships that lived at the office: when the job or the desk goes, those people need a message from you. What to write, and when, is in how to keep in touch with coworkers after you leave a job.

When you’re bad at texting back

A lot of people who lose touch aren’t bad friends at all. They read a message, mean to answer properly, and three weeks later feel too embarrassed to reply. If that’s you, it helps to lower the bar: a one-line answer now is better than a good answer never. We wrote a whole post about being bad at texting back.

Try sending a voice note when typing feels like too much. Or just call, if you’d rather talk than type. It doesn’t matter how you do it. And skip the long apology when you finally write. “Sorry, I’m terrible at this. How did the move go?” is plenty.

Without social media

Watching someone’s stories can feel like staying in touch, but they usually have no idea you saw them, and you learn the highlights and not much else. You can follow someone for years and still not know how they’re really doing.

You don’t need to delete anything. Just don’t count it. Keep the phone numbers of the people you care about, and write to them directly. When a post makes you think of someone, answer it with a real message, or send a separate one. Calling works fine too, even though it has somehow become strange. Most people are glad once they pick up.

That’s also why Ciao! is not a feed: the other person is never in the app, there’s nothing to scroll, and nobody can see you’re using it.

Make it a habit, not a guilt trip

Motivation doesn’t last, and guilt is worse. If keeping in touch depends on suddenly remembering someone at the right moment, it will fail on any busy week. You need something outside your head, and it needs to be gentle enough that you don’t start ignoring it.

The simplest version is a list on your phone that you look at every Sunday over coffee. It takes five minutes, and it works for many people.

Ciao! is the app I make for this. You choose how often for each person, and it counts from the last time you talked. A calendar would ring on its date even if you spoke yesterday. Here, when you log a talk, the clock starts again. When it’s been a while with someone, you get a short note that evening. On Sunday, a short stack of cards shows who you haven’t talked to. Swipe right when you’ve talked, or left for “Not now” and they come back next Sunday. It can’t read your chats, so you tell it yourself, and it never sends a message for you. There are no streaks to protect. And if you tend to lose dates, it helps with birthdays too.

Questions

How often should you contact friends?

There’s no single right answer. Something every week or two suits your closest people, and every month or two suits good friends you don’t see often. Pick a rough rhythm for each person and change it if it feels wrong.

How do you keep in touch without it feeling forced?

Keep it small and specific. Send the photo that made you think of them, or ask how the interview went. It only feels forced when you write to “catch up” with nothing to say. A short real message feels natural to almost anyone.

Is there an app to remind you to keep in touch?

Yes, several. Ciao! is one, for iPhone, and it counts from the last time you talked. We compare it with more than 60 others in our list of apps to keep in touch with friends, including free ones and ones for Android.