A message that has been sent between two people four times in a year, each time sincerely, and has never once produced a plan.
Adult friendships mostly die of scheduling. Not a row, not a drift in values, just two people who kept meaning to and then did not, until enough time passed that getting back in touch became its own project.
The instinct is that the fix is more effort. Usually the fix is much less effort, applied more often.
Not depth. Not frequency of meeting. Evidence that you are still in each other's heads.
That is a much lower bar than most people apply. A friendship where you meet twice a year but each of you regularly sends the other something small is in far better health than one where you have dinner quarterly and hear nothing between.
The dinners are the friendship's output. The small signals are what keep it from ending.
Each of these takes under ten seconds and asks for nothing.
Send the thing that reminded you of them. A photo, a link, a screenshot. No commentary required.
this is the exact pub we couldn't find
React to something they said months ago.
the thing you said about your boss has been rattling round my head for weeks
Report a small outcome they'd have context for.
the plant lived
Acknowledge a date you know about. A first day, a result, a hospital appointment. Not the day after.
good luck tomorrow. no need to reply
That last clause is the whole technique. Attaching no need to reply to a message removes the obligation, and a message with no obligation costs the recipient nothing to receive.
It is not silence with good intentions. Thinking warmly about someone for eight months produces nothing they can detect. From their side it is identical to being forgotten.
It is not the vague reopener. "We should do something soon" has never in recorded history produced a plan. It hands the work of proposing to them, and if neither of you proposes it converts into a small shared guilt.
It is not only responding. If you reliably answer and never initiate, the friendship runs entirely on their effort, and most people eventually stop paying for both sides. That one is worth checking honestly, because from the inside it feels like being easy-going.
Half of why plans do not happen is that the default plan is expensive. An evening, a booking, a trip across town, three hours.
Lower it.
I am walking past yours on Thursday, tea for twenty minutes?
call while I drive back on Sunday?
I will be in that cafe from ten, come if you want
Twenty minutes that happens beats three hours that keeps not happening, and the twenty minutes usually turns into ninety anyway.
Sometimes the maintenance stopped a while ago and the question is not how to keep it going but how to restart it. That has its own piece, including what to send by how long it has been: what to text a friend after months of not talking.
Being low-maintenance is often described as a virtue, and it partly is. It is also, sometimes, a way of never asking for anything, which is its own kind of absence.
A friendship where neither person ever needs the other is not especially low-maintenance. It is just quiet. Worth knowing which one you are running.
A friendship that needs constant attention to survive is a demanding one, and a friendship nobody ever signals into is an ended one. Almost everything worth keeping sits between those, and it takes less than people think.