This is part of Advice Week: Friendship Edition. We’ll help you make friends, leave them—and even sleep with them.
Tragedy struck shortly before the start of second grade. My best friend, Ricarda, who lived in the same apartment complex and always shared her Barbies with me, announced glumly one day that her family was moving back to Germany. This wasn’t just devastating—it was incomprehensible. I remember asking when she would return, as if she were only going on an extra-long vacation. Ricarda couldn’t give me an answer. So, together, our soft, sheltered elementary-school brains beheld the most terrifying realization imaginable: that we might not see each other again. But just as immediately, that horror was tempered by a soulful promise: We would just have to be best pen pals forever.
For nearly 15 years, we actually made it work. For the rest of grade school and into the better part of middle school, ours was a friendship conducted through monthly-ish letters. I still remember the thrill of unearthing her letters, always festooned with big, bright international stamps and addressed in Ricarda’s increasingly steadier cursive, from the pile of mail at home. I’d squirrel this latest missive up to my room to savor the experience of reading Ricarda’s dispatches about her new school, her new friends, and her exotic-sounding lifestyle in the city of Friedrichshafen. I’d write back corresponding observations about having to take Chinese lessons or getting a little brother. On birthdays, a heavily taped cardboard box would appear on the front porch, stuffed inside with stickers, lip gloss, Diddl Mouse stationery, and Milka chocolate bars. Then I’d stress out in the aisles of the Walmart Supercenter, trying to scout out knickknacks and candy that were cool enough to send back to Ricarda in thanks. Eventually, the packages and letters tapered off. But as soon as we were old enough to log on to Facebook as teenagers, we found each other again and sent infrequent but warm messages back and forth.
One spring, when we were both still in high school, Ricarda messaged me to say that she was in town to perform with her youth orchestra. (This had something to do with Peoria, our hometown, and Friedrichshafen being “sister cities,” which now seems like a touching twist of fate.) Did I want to hang out? By then, I could barely remember what Ricarda even looked like without using Facebook as a reminder, but I was curious about what had become of her. During her visit, we spent an afternoon walking around an outlet mall together, and it was pleasant enough that, a few years later in college, I visited her during my study-abroad summer. We spent a weekend together in Cologne—where all I recall is how strange it felt to explain who I was to her “real” friends. Eventually, we both individually fell off Facebook and lost touch.
But that’s the least surprising part, if you ask me. The original friendship we’d formed at the apartment-complex bus stop was built on dolls and proximity. If Ricarda had never moved away, we likely would have faded out of each other’s lives much sooner. But as long-distance friends, we got to watch each other grow up and even celebrate that feat with fireworks over the Rhine River during that one final weekend we spent together. Now that I’m in my 30s, where almost every friendship inevitably turns into a juggling act across constraints with space and time, my (fuzzy) memories of Ricarda have sweetened into a real appreciation for our kiddish, determined act of pen-palling against the odds. It’s made me think about how long-distance friendship—a bond you build together entirely out of mutual effort, in spite of daily routines, time-zone differences, and an unreliable postal service—might be the purest form of friendship of all.
Considering how geographically mobile modern life has become (scrambled only further by the pandemic and a new generation of remote work), long-distance friendships are just a fact of life. In high school and college, the sense of inevitable separation is one of the defining conditions of those early friendships; as adults, our drifts according to the tides of romance, family, or economic prospects leave most of us with a scattered constellation of friendships with people who are no longer just a 10-minute walk or drive away. This used to bum me out. For a long time, I thought that you had to spend only your 20s assembling a sitcom slate’s worth of friends, then you could be done with it. Instead, I had to learn how to welcome and accept entire seasons’ worth of casting changes—but also how to fine-tune the delicate, underrated art of keeping in touch as people come and go. That is what all this technology is for, isn’t it? Now that long-distance friendships don’t have to rely on the business hours of a Midwestern post office, they’re easier to maintain and grow. To build an LDF that lasts, all that’s required is what any friendship needs at its core: a little bit of thought.
First, you have to DTF: define the friendship (not to be confused with “define the relationship” or the other DTF). This is a concept that Berlin-based friend Michelle taught me; she and I originally met in New York as co-workers, but we didn’t become close until she moved away and I reached back out to her on a whim when visiting her city two years ago. She took me on a day trip to visit a nearby castle, and after spending hours gabbing nonstop that afternoon, we realized how much more time we wanted to spend together. Last summer, we decided to meet up again via a weeklong trip to Greece, just the two of us (automatically international vacations—just one of the perks of the LDF!), and we talked a lot about our hopes for and frustrations with modern friendship. The problem, we agreed, was that it’s hard to communicate your expectations for friendship versus, say, the well-worn scripts and shorthand we have for romantic love.
We spent the week toggling between analyzing our desires and dreams under an intense magnifying glass—and enjoying the very underrated freedom of exchanging gossip about the people in our lives whom the other would never have to meet. During one of those talks, I remember that Michelle paused and told me that if I ever needed a friend to talk to—especially about these kinds of deep, emotional tangles—she wanted to be that person for me. Michelle took the leap and told me up front what she wanted to give to me via friendship. I was only too happy to take her up on it and offer to listen and commiserate in return. (I particularly requested that she complain to me about Europeans as much as she wanted, because I am nothing if not a co-complainer and a patriot.) We felt so giddy afterward that we had to keep rubbing our faces from all the smiling, as if we’d unlocked a secret password for understanding each other and how to be a part of each other’s lives.
This tacit agreement gave our budding friendship a defining contour, and I’ve since adopted this approach with other long-distance friendships. Having the DTF conversation, even if only implicitly, has often helped me articulate why I want to hang on to a connection at all, even if it’s complicated by time-zone math and cultural translation of, like, what a Dimes Square is. For example, there’s no one I enjoy clowning on movies with more than Sean in L.A., and there’s also no one I’d rather discuss deep high school lore with than Jennifer in Chicago. Such LDFs are built on the glorious specifics of what only we can give each other. (Well, Sean in L.A. is probably talking about movies with a lot of people.) It costs nothing to go out of your way to say, Hey, I want to be [this kind of person] for you. It’s great for any type of friendship, but for friendships that aren’t easily sustained by routine contact, I’ve found that defining things makes it clear that they’re more than just someone I text when I’m bored at work.
Once you’ve had the “What are we?” talk, you do have to come to at least an unspoken rule about the forms and cadence of correspondence. This requires a bit of tinkering and a lot of paying attention to what your LDF responds to. After my friend Julia first moved to San Francisco, I felt guilty about pinging her so many random news items and updates during Eastern Time hours until she told me that she liked having a personal news feed to wake up to. This worked for us because we were both utterly addicted to our phones, but there are other friends whom I’d try this on and not hear from for weeks (sometimes even months) because most well-adjusted people do not want a reading to-do list in their iMessages. I’ve learned to not take the silence personally and to instead experiment with voice notes, FaceTime, long-ass emails, and, yes, sometimes even a postcard in the mail. Sharing a highly specific TikTok can express that you’re thinking of someone and understand a piece of them more than any “Hey, so how have you been?” text can—until Jennifer from Chicago goes on a TikTok fast (good for her) and you learn to switch to Reels. It’s a small price to pay.
Which leads me to one final word of advice: Never lose your shared bit. In the absence of regular physical time together doing activities (which is really time spent acquiring primary material for future bits, isn’t it?), a successful LDF requires an acute understanding of the location-agnostic binding glue that keeps two people interested and enthusiastic about staying in each other’s lives that isn’t just catching up over drinks until we all die. With Jennifer, it’s all about the central Illinois humor; with my D.C.–based friend Kyle, we’re never not fantasizing about what being a medieval peon would have been like. And nearly all of my texts to L.A. Lauren are social media updates from a rapper whom we can’t stop making fun of: the bonding nectar of life!
There was a college friend—a best friend, really—whom I used to talk to every day for years until our careers started taking us in literally different directions after graduation. I could never understand why I started avoiding their texts and calls until I realized that these catch-ups were just that: We were only ever trading updates from our lives, which had grown increasingly foreign and unrelatable to each other. Trying to describe something as simple as a night out entailed too much context and explanation for a 30-minute call, much less a text. Our former bits started to run out of material—the mutual acquaintances we gossiped about became more scarce, our different degrees of existing online meant that neither of us understood the videos the other sent, and neither of us had time, or even overlapping vacation days, to fully translate our experiences to each other.
There’s a world in which I could have addressed the growing disconnect with this friend directly. Maybe we could have tried a few things, like conversation cards or committing to a TV procedural, that would at least have given us new, weekly-occurring material to talk about. We could have tried to re-DTF since we obviously couldn’t give each other what we once did. But ultimately, I’m not proud to say that everything ground to a stop. I miss her, of course, though in an ambiguous way. Sometimes I try to picture what she’s doing, all those thousands of miles away, and I feel miffed by how blank that mental image is. Long-distance friendships can be forgiving, but effort is the one ingredient you can’t paper over with rules about bits and texting cadences. I’ve told myself that maybe, as with Ricarda, this particular connection has simply run its course. At least for now; we do still have each other’s phone numbers, after all. I like to think that that means, as long as neither of us changes our number, we’ll never really be lost to each other. What a comfort that still is, and what a starting point it could still be.
