Friendship Styles : text-message responses and "remote housemates"

EARLY DRAFT!

My long-lasting friends are a diverse bunch, but they all have one thing in common: they all return texts fairly quickly, virtually always.  Besides the obvious "being more engaged", is there a deeper meaning?  Can the average text response time be used as a predictor of friendship longevity?

I'm come to see that the answer appears to be "yes" on both counts.  Let me elaborate!

First, let's be clear: I'm NOT talking about new acquaintances, i.e. situations where a sluggish response could be - and often is - a sign of lukewarm interest.  Here I'm talking about friends or prospective friends past the initial stage, after a connection has been established and it appears to be generally solid.

Text-Message Responses

Whenever I further investigate chronic substantial delays in responses, it typically appears to point to a personality trait, rather than some dynamics between me and that person - and I hear a lot of "I'm the same with ALL my other friends".

I also hear a lot of "being busy"... and, sure, there's no denying that overwhelm can be an issue for all of us.  But I have chronically-busy friends who almost never fail to respond quickly.  By contrast, others (0% of whom tend to advance to long-term friendship) have a chronic "response delay" no matter what is happening in their life.  

Here I'm talking about non-trivial and fairly-chronic delays that make you feel like you're talking to yourself.

Given that putting a smiley or other reaction to a message takes about 3 seconds... and a quick comment (or audio message) takes only a few seconds more...  the "busy" slant is likely not a deep explanation.

Over the years, I've come to see 2 broad scenarios.

The first is easier to state, but won't further explore here: people suffering from depression.

The second broad category seem to point to differences in core values about friendship style: I nickname it "show vs. tell" - let me explain!

Show vs. Tell

Aspiring fiction writers (myself, at one time!) hear oodles of "show, don't tell" as advice.   In a nutshell, "telling" is giving a summary, while "showing" is about bringing the reader into the life of the character.   I'll just quickly borrow an example courtesy of Google:  "She was nervous about the test" (telling) vs. "Her foot tapped relentlessly as she chewed the eraser off her pencil." (showing)

What does all this have to do with friendship styles??

Please bear with me, as I take you on a little side tour that was an eye opener for me...

Let's travel back to the dark period of early 2020.  At the start of Covid, I was sharing an apartment with my awesome housemate G.  In the chaotic early days of the pandemic, we tried to isolate, and text each other, though our respective rooms were just at opposite ends of the small kitchen.

When, a few months later, she moved to just about the opposite end of the planet, we simply continued texting each other...  and in a strange way it didn't seem too different whether she was in the next room or 12 time zones away!

I ended up coining the term "remote housemate".

Remote Housemate

In the intervening years, I've come to see the "remote housemate" paradigm as a form of friendship style.   

The "housemate" part refers to the day-to-day details of living - in the moment!  (or almost so.)  

The "remote" part refers to friends we're not actually living with.

To be clear, whenever I say "housemate" you need to mentally translate it to "GREAT housemate" - or the analogy fails!

Minimalist Example

VERSION A: on Monday, your friends shares her excitement and nervousness about an upcoming job interview (or first date, etc); on Tuesday you hear about it just as it concludes: the good, the bad, the open questions and the uncertain outcome; on Friday your friends shares the news she got the job!

Compare with VERSION B: a week after the fact, you hear the story of your friend getting a job that you didn't even know she was interested in, let alone applying to.

Which version is more compelling?   The "catching up" with a friend's old news, or the "living together in the moment" through them?  It's a real-life case of "telling" vs. "showing"!

Friendship Styles

I've come to the conclusion that the "remote housemate" model is the friendship style that works for me.  And it's one that seems more likely to survive geographical separation, busy periods, etc.

By contrasts, the "catching up" modality tend to degrade into less-and-less frequent catch-up, which is less-and-less compelling - and then a gradual downward slide into a frozen state of nothingness.  

Big Breakups with friends tend to be rare, at least for me: far more typically, it's more like walking into the arctic snow fields, and moving more and more slowly thru it, with a growing distance to your friend.  Their voice gets progressively dim thru the fog.  They're somewhere, around some snow bank or glacier, across the fog - presumably alive but definitely not an active part of your life.

If devoting time is the "oxygen of friendship", a steady diet of real-time sharing (a form of co-living) is the "fuel", I dare say!

Circling back to the original dilemma about the meaning of response time to texts: consistently sluggish responses are like major speed bumps on real-time sharing, not to mention (for local friends) a derailment of attempts at spontaneity.  

I've come to see that the deeper significance is: a track switch from a modality of "show" to one of "tell".