Here's a quick look at my conversation with Nina.

The friendship stuff that gets people to my site is usually some version of I always text first.

I always call first.

I am always the one initiating plans.

Should I stop calling my friend and see what happens? It's all the same question.

Yes.

different ways of asking it.

Yeah.

Is that what you mean by keeping score?

Yes.

I think that what gets in the way of old friendships is a perceived lack of effort or a perceived, uh, lack of equality in effort.

And I really believe that we just need to redefine what effort looks like because we all have very different skill sets.

And even with an old friend that we know very well, it's still we're all human, and it's still hard not to expect other people to do friendship exactly the way we do or exactly the way it was always done between you and this friend.

So if you're an old friend and you used to live in the same apartment building, you didn't have to make a lot of effort.

Once someone moves, so now there's been a shift in just reality of the situation, it takes a lot of maturity to realize we have to change how we communicate.

I wonder, how can we give our friends the grace and the space to change?