[ALittleLight]

I have a friend who does this. It used to be that every year or so he would come out to where I live for a convention he liked to go to and he would stay at my house for 3-4 days and we'd catch up, go do some stuff in the evening when he wasn't at the convention, etc.

One year he resolved to "do better about keeping up" - apparently feeling bad that our entire message history was him texting me a month before the convention asking if he could stay with me, and me saying that he could. True to his word, ever after that, he has periodically texted me every few months just to make idle conversation. He even stopped going to the convention but still keeps messaging me periodically - which I appreciate because it shows he didn't view me only as a hotel replacement.

Still, I prefer our old arrangement. Frankly, I don't need to know how he is doing every few months and I find it a bit awkward to make small talk any way. As I just have one friend that does this it's not so bad, but if I had more friends who wanted to just regularly "check in" like this, I'd have to start blocking people, ending friendships, or developing an automated routine to tell the curious that I'm doing well and to ask about their family and our mutual friends, etc.

[tomgs]

> Frankly, I don't need to know how he is doing every few months and I find it a bit awkward to make small talk any way.

There's a bit of secret sauce here that I tend to rely on to prevent myself from being considered "that guy".

First and foremost, I do this as much as possible via e-mail. Phone or WhatsApp is indeed too "personal" for these type of things (save for one person, an old boss of mine, who I have a scheduled zoom call with once a month. But that's just because he and I just like the chit-chat, it appears).

I write up a long-form message, something like 5-8 paragraphs with real news about myself and the things I've been up to, and ship that alongside the usual casual chit-chat.

It's surprisingly useful - I think this is the only context in which long-form e-mail is a good thing.

But then again, I grew up in an era where e-mail is the devil, and this was not always the case (or so they tell me).

[hammock]

What strikes me as the secret sauce there is the 5-8 paragraphs of info that gets dumped at once. There is something value in there that the other can pick up on and continue the thread.

Compare that to a text , where you might send a sentence or two and expect them to come back with something- when in fact, they weren't thinking about YOU and therefore aren't prepared to respond. Hence awkward.

[tomgs]

Yep, yep. Makes all the difference.

Liking to write helps a lot with keeping in touch.