Adult friendships are bizarre.

I'm not great at them, if I'm being honest. Not unfriendly — just not naturally the one who picks up the phone. Not the one who books the dinner. I think about people constantly. I genuinely do. I'll be driving somewhere and a mate will pop into my head and I'll think, I should call him. That's a real thought. It happens.

And then I don't call him.

I mean to. The intention is completely sincere. But somewhere between the thought and the action, something else always needs doing, and the call gets filed under soon, which is where good intentions go to quietly expire.

We had friendships, not long ago, that were the real thing. Both families. Every weekend, without much planning — you'd just end up at each other's place, kids running around, nothing particularly organised, just easy. The kind of friendship where you don't have to explain yourself. Where showing up is the whole arrangement.

And then, at some point, it started happening less.

No falling out. No conversation about it. No moment you could point to. One weekend something else was on. Then another. Then you stopped being the default plan and became the occasional plan. Then you stopped being the occasional plan too.

One day you do the maths and realise the last time was much longer ago than you thought.

And there's no reason. That's the strange part. Just frequency that tapered to nothing, one small choice at a time, until the habit was gone and the friendship was running on goodwill alone.

Goodwill, it turns out, has a shelf life.

Seneca wrote that we're tight-fisted with money but reckless with time — the one thing it actually makes sense to hoard. We assume there's more of it. We assume the friendship will survive another few months of good intentions and sporadic Instagram likes. It usually does. Until quietly, without announcement, it doesn't.

Nobody decided to let those friendships go.

But they went anyway.

Which is a different kind of loss. There's no one to be angry at. No argument to replay. Just the slow, mundane arithmetic of two people repeatedly choosing other things until the habit of each other was gone.

Then there are the other ones. The mates I'd still call close, genuinely. The ones who still mean the world to me. The ones I think about.

Six to twelve months between calls. Sometimes longer.

I'm aware of how that sounds. I'm also aware it's true, for me people than just me.

I tell myself I'll call. I mean it when I say it. And then life does what life does — not dramatically, just persistently — and somehow it's been eight months again and I'm back to thinking about calling instead of calling.

Here's the part I find a bit confronting though.

About eight months ago I started playing Magic the Gathering on Monday nights.

Yes. The card game. I know.

But the friendships that currently have the most life in them — the ones with real weekly texture, genuine conversation, people I actually know things about — are not the ones I've been carefully tending with good intentions and the occasional guilty text. They're the ones held together by a recurring Monday night at a game store.

I didn't become a better friend.

I just found a container.

The structure did what the intention never could. Show up at the same time, same place, every week, and friendship just... happens. You don't have to remember to call. You don't have to schedule anything. You just go.

It's not a profound system. It's barely a system at all.

But it works in a way that caring deeply, apparently, does not.

I think about that a lot in relation to the mates I haven't called. The ones who still mean the world to me and wouldn't know it from my behaviour. The ones I'm probably, slowly, doing the same thing to that I watched happen to those other friendships — not through any decision, just through the accumulated weight of days where something else needed doing.

The fix isn't complicated.

Book something. Put it in the calendar. Give the friendship a container before it has to survive on intention alone.

I know this.

I've known it for a while, actually.

My phone still hasn't moved.

But I'm thinking about it. Which, if history is any guide, is at least the step before the step where I do something about it.

That's probably enough progress for one week.

If this gave you something to think about, feel free to forward it to someone who might appreciate it.

Until next time,
Broden Johnson