Stay in Touch!: Tips for Maintaining Long-Distance Friendships

Advertisement

Maintaining a healthy friendship at the best of times requires some work and commitment, but when you are living in different cities, countries, or even continents, and juggling a career, home, and raising children, it gets tricky very fast. Weeks or months can easily fly by without meaningful interactions with your close friends. However, all is not lost. Here, we’ve gathered some tips about how to maintain friendships abroad, and specifically, from China.

Manage Expectations

As soon as you can, warn your friends that you may not be able to maintain the same frequency or style of contact as you did before. Saying things like “I care a lot about you and still value your friendship, even if you don’t hear from me as much as you used to” can go a long way to easing the transition and preventing friends from feeling abandoned.

If you have friends who have never lived abroad or even in another town, it may not have occurred to them that staying in touch can be hard. Talking to them through challenges like time differences and technological barriers could make a world of difference.

Don’t Force a Square Peg Into a Round Hole

Friendships that were formed around a shared activity like a sport don’t always transition well to ‘one-on-one conversation’ modes, and not everybody enjoys spending hours on the phone. Don’t take it too hard if your hiking buddies and knitting circle friends don’t pick up when you call nor respond to your long emails in a timely fashion. It’s not your friendship that’s awkward, it’s your medium and it will take time for you to find your new friendship groove.

Expect the Unexpected

Making stable long-distance calls from China can be a pain. WeChat is the most reliable app for making calls but rather difficult for foreigners to set up without a Chinese SIM card. Lucky iPhone users are able to FaceTime one another for free, but the rest of us need to find other alternatives. Regardless of the method you use, allow a bit more time to deal with technical issues when scheduling a call than you may usually do to avoid frustration.

Advertisement

Reframe the Conversation

Saying “I miss you” and “it’s been ages” to a friend, even if it’s totally true, might make them feel pressured or even guilty about your lack of contact. We all have busy lives, but a slight change in approach could make it easier to keep the conversation flowing. “I’ve been thinking of you a lot” is a great alternative, as is “so much has been going on, I can’t wait to share my updates with you and hear all of yours.”

Ask Advice

Ask for help, even if you don’t need it. One friend regularly asks her Dad for advice about everything from home repairs, to health insurance, and the best time to buy vegetables. As a grown woman she doesn’t need this advice per se, but she knows that it makes her Dad feel included, and part of her life. For cultures (like Chinese) in which people don’t usually express love and affection with words, this can be a powerful way to show appreciation and keep bonds alive.

Schedule Emails

Another friend has found a way to make emailing feel more like old-fashioned letter writing. Every two weeks, he writes an email to a friend who lives in another time zone, then uses email software to schedule it to send at a time that he knows his friend will be on a boring commute. A week later, his friend does the same thing. These regular emails give them both something to look forward to reading, and also takes the pressure off feeling that they need to reply immediately.

Avoid the Dreaded “So How’s Life?”

Remember when you talked to your friends one month after moving to Beijing, and they asked you “so how’s China?”. Um… big? Huge, open-ended questions like this are easy to ask but hard to answer. If it’s been a while since you were last in contact with someone, pause before you reach out and try to think of a few specific, pointed questions you can ask to get the ball rolling. “What are you reading right now?”, “Is the baby eating solids?”, “Have you found a good lunch spot in your new neighborhood?”. As they answer these questions, you’ll both build the momentum to cover the rest of the ‘life’ stuff.

Get Meme-ing

My oldest friend and I can go months without a proper conversation, but we stay connected and in each other’s hearts by sending ridiculous memes back and forth over Instagram. Whether it’s sending memes, sharing articles you think they’ll like, or tagging them in funny tweets, there are a myriad of ways to easily ‘nudge’ your friends and remind them of your shared interests and history, no matter how busy you both are.

Bait the Lurkers

If you are struggling to get news from that quiet friend in a group chat who reads messages but never responds, set low-commitment mini-challenges that everybody can do, regardless of their mood. For example, post a funny, unflattering selfie and tell everybody to reply with their own, immediately! Or take a picture of their lunch, or their view, or their shoes, or whatever. Little challenges like this are easy to do no matter how busy you are and help everybody feel connected.

Send Voice Messages

Depending on the context, unsolicited voice messages can be a pain in the butt. But there is something really lovely about hearing the voice of a good friend instead of the usual block of text. Many different apps support sending VM’s, and you can fit so much more feeling, warmth, and, well, information into a ten-second voice message. Your children can record special messages for friends and relatives too, and it literally only takes a few seconds.

Finally… Accept That Friendships Change

Friendships come in all shapes and sizes, and they change over time too. If despite all your efforts, you find yourself drifting away from a friend, don’t sweat it too much. It’s natural for long-term friendships to go through seasons and you may come very close together again in the future.

Advertisement

Photos: Unsplash 

What's Hot This Week