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Takeout on the couch counts
Many people assume friendship means going out to dinner, planning trips, or doing something social every time. Life happens to everyone, though. People move, jobs grow more demanding, friends have children or get married, take on caring for family, or run low on energy and money.
Friendships can fade through all of that, and they don't have to. Flexible plans keep them alive: a friend might ask whether you mind coming over for takeout, or suggest watching the movie on their couch instead of going to the theater.
Distance works the same way. Regular video calls, thoughtful texts, and visits whenever possible keep a friendship going across miles, and flexibility about how to spend time together helps it last longer.
Why do friendships fade without regular contact?
In a 2011 paper in Evolution and Human Behavior, Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar followed people's relationships over 18 months. Friendships lost emotional closeness when contact became infrequent, while closeness to family held up with much less contact. Dunbar has described friendships as more fragile than family ties for this reason.
Why does sharing a meal bond people?
Robin Dunbar reported in a 2017 paper in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology that, in a survey of adults in the United Kingdom, people who ate with others more often were more likely to feel happy and satisfied with life. They were also more likely to be engaged with their local community and to have friends they could turn to for support. Dunbar suggests that communal eating works as a bonding mechanism, much as singing and laughing together do.
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