There’s a common belief that keeping a friendship alive requires real, substantial time together — a long phone call, a proper dinner, a weekend visit — and that anything shorter is basically pointless. A quick “thinking of you” text feels too small to matter, so people put it off, telling themselves they’ll do something more meaningful once things calm down. Things rarely calm down, and the friendship quietly fades in the meantime.
This belief doesn’t hold up well.
For their study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers conducted a series of experiments involving more than 5,900 individuals to figure out whether people actually estimate accurately how much others appreciate
being reached out to. The lead researcher, Peggy Liu of the University of Pittsburgh, put it plainly:
“our research suggests that people significantly underestimate how much others will appreciate being reached out to.”
The gesture that registered as meaningful wasn’t a long call or a big favor — often it was just someone messaging
“just because” or “just to catch up” after not speaking with them for a really long time
, and it consistently landed better than the sender expected.
That underestimation seems to be exactly why people hold back. A related, separate 2024 study by
Lara B. Aknin and Gillian M. Sandstrom
, titled ”
People are surprisingly hesitant to reach out to old friends
,” found that people are reluctant to reconnect even when they clearly want to — and that the reluctance shows up in the moment, even when general willingness is high.
It’s worth separating this from a different, older piece of research that sometimes gets misapplied here. University of Kansas professor Jeffrey Hall found that turning a stranger into a close friend takes real time:
combining the results of both studies, he estimated it takes between 40 and 60 hours to form a casual friendship, 80-100 hours to transition to being a friend and more than 200 hours together to become good friends.
That number gets quoted often, but it describes building a relationship from nothing. It says little about what’s needed to maintain a friendship that already exists. Construction and maintenance are different jobs, and the second one is far cheaper than people assume.
So what to actually do: stop waiting for a real block of time before you reach out, and stop pre-editing the message into something more substantial than it needs to be. If something reminds you of a friend, send it in the moment rather than saving it for “when we properly catch up” — a screenshot, a voice memo, a one-line “this made me think of you” costs thirty seconds and, per the research above, tends to land far better than you’d predict. Don’t wait for a milestone or a crisis to be the occasion; ordinary moments work fine, arguably better, since they’re unexpected. And if you’re often the one wondering why a friend has gone quiet, consider that they’re probably not measuring the friendship by call length either — they may just be sitting on the same hesitation you are.
None of this replaces long dinners and real visits when you can manage them. But treating small, quick contact as beneath the friendship, rather than as what keeps it breathing between the big moments, is the actual mistake — and it’s one you can undo today, in less time than it took to read this.
