The friend you once saw three times a week now takes a month to reply. Nothing disastrous has happened between you. There was no argument to explain the silence, no memorable offence to apologise for. There have been children, a move, different working hours, perhaps an illness, and somehow a relationship that once ran on proximity now requires arrangements neither of you is very good at making.
It can be painful to discover that affection does not organise a diary. We interpret the missing invitation as evidence of what we are worth. Then, to protect ourselves, we stop inviting. The other person may make exactly the same calculation, and the friendship becomes a mutual demonstration of how little either of us apparently cares. There are friendships in which the effort has become genuinely unequal. Somebody gets in touch only when they need something. We keep rearranging our lives around a person who never rearranges theirs. Recognising this may be overdue. But absence can have other explanations, and guessing at motives from a telephone that has not rung is an unreliable business. Before treating the relationship as finished, we might ask what is happening to it.
A friendship may need a different shape. The long evening out becomes a walk near somebody’s home. A weekly conversation becomes an occasional exchange that neither person treats as a performance review. You might stop expecting the friend who dislikes telephone calls to prove affection through telephone calls. They might stop assuming your willingness to travel means the journey costs you nothing.
This is easier when we can say something specific. ‘I miss seeing you’ offers a person something they can answer. ‘You never make an effort’ begins a trial, with several years of correspondence likely to enter evidence. It is possible to explain hurt without issuing a verdict on somebody’s entire character. It is also possible to ask for a change they cannot offer. Hearing that honestly is useful, even when it is disappointing.
Some friendships belong largely to a period of life. They need not be declared fraudulent because the period has ended. A person can have been important to you without remaining close forever. Others survive through considerable changes because both people keep finding an arrangement that suits the lives they now have.
I would be reluctant to judge every friendship by frequency. There are people we see often without feeling known, and people whose rare arrival allows a conversation to resume with astonishing ease. Yet warmth remembered from years ago cannot do all the work indefinitely. Someone still has to suggest a day, answer honestly, or say that the old arrangement has become difficult.
The next invitation could be smaller and more realistic. You may discover a friendship that was waiting for a workable way to continue. You may discover that you have been keeping it alive alone. Either answer gives you more to live with than another month of checking the phone.