The Move That Quietly Ended Half Your Friendships
Distance does not break affection, it removes the accidental contact that affection was living on.
Moving suburb, city or country is the single most common cause of friendship loss in adult life, and it is almost never experienced that way at the time. You move, everyone says they will visit, and for a while the messages continue. What has actually happened is that the accidental contact has stopped: no more running into each other, no more being in the same room for a reason unrelated to friendship. Once every interaction has to be deliberately initiated, the interaction rate falls to whatever the more organised of the two people can sustain, which is usually much lower than either expects.
The same thing happens without anybody moving. A change of job, a new shift pattern, a baby, an illness in the family, taking up something that eats the weekends: each removes a category of accidental contact. The friendship does not end. It goes quiet, and quiet is very easily mistaken for over. Months pass, and then the length of the silence itself becomes an obstacle, because getting back in touch now seems to require an explanation for the gap.
It does not require an explanation. That is the single most useful thing to know about this. The person on the other end almost certainly has the same guilt in the same shape and has been assuming you drifted for reasons of your own. A message that says nothing more than that you were thinking of them, with no apology attached, resolves it far more often than people expect. The distance was never the problem. The contact was, and contact is repairable at any point.