Keeping in Touch: The Hard Way

Everyone has heard the old adage that long-distance relationships never work. Now I know this cliché is intended to apply to romantic relationships continued over a vast distance (LDRs, if you will, for simplicity's sake), but the same is true for the majority of my relationships- platonic and otherwise. If I do not see a person regularly, chances are that I do not speak with him regularly either.

This is due to a great number of factors- the most notorious one being my aversion to phone conversations longer than two minutes- but always ends in the same result: me hopelessly searching the MIA person's facebook for any status update or comment that might give me a clue towards figuring out her whereabouts. This usually results in me finding out about the awesome trip they took to the city I am currently living in- three weeks ago.

So here comes the easy solution: pick up the phone, dummy. Write a stupid email every once and a while. Send a postcard. Buy a carrier pigeon. Do whatever is necessary to get a life update. All of these are simple solutions (well, maybe not the trained bird option), but are also ones that escape me on a regular basis. For the same reason that I have not written a single thank you note for any of the graduation presents that I received in May, I have not written/spoken to my old roommate for almost two years.

The concept of keeping in touch is only exacerbated when the missing half of your relationship is located in an inconveniently distant time zone. My best friend is currently spending her summer in Morocco traveling around with her boo, glamorously soaking up the African rays. Meanwhile, I am in Boston, five hours behind, sweating in the middle of a cold shower. My horrible communication skills and ever-changing work schedule combine with her lack of consistent access to the internet has caused us to almost never speak. When she sent me an urgent email this weekend requesting a Skype date, we were at a loss for finding a time to talk that worked for both of us.

Though the Internet has undoubtedly made the world smaller- it has also made the world busier. It is easier than ever to brush people off, to delete them from your life completely with one click of the unfriend button. Where we once had to take time to look up a fact in an alphabetized book (encyclopedias- the horror!), we can now find instantly on an iPhone. Where letter writing used to mean the world, you can now just send a text immediately after meeting someone. The threat of constantly being able to get in contact with someone somehow deters you from ever doing so. The idea that I could just pick up the phone whenever I felt like it and call means that I probably never will.

The pros and cons of our smaller world are infinite- but neither side makes it any easier to find a time to talk to my best friend. Although, maybe if they invent enough gadgets the world wil get small enough to eliminate the need for time zones.