Man, sometimes I could just kick myself. There are a ton of people that I really care about that I just don’t take the time to contact nearly as often as I should.
I get really busy and isolate myself, and then I start feeling guilty, and then I feel like it would be awkward to pop up out of the blue and say hi with no good excuse for the long delay, and so I delay more… and before I know it I’m just horribly out of touch with everybody!
I’m also mildly phone-phobic, which doesn’t help. Calling strangers is the worst–sometimes I’ll actually have flutters in my stomach while I’m waiting for a business to answer the phone if it’s something more involved than ordering a pizza or something. As for calling friends, I have a fear that I’ll be interrupting someone if I call them, but they’ll be too polite to say anything*, so then we’ll talk for a long time and afterward they’ll be irritated that I kept them on the phone. I know it’s totally irrational and I hope I get over it eventually.
So am I alone? Anyone else out there find themselves in this spiral? How do you get out of it? What is the secret to keeping up with people without them feeling like you’re hounding them or intruding?
Oh, and to my friends out there on the SDMB who I haven’t touched base with in forever, um… hi. I still love you guys. I really do. I just suck
*this is actually an ongoing paranoia of mine in life in general. I’m always afraid that secretly, people are annoyed by me but too polite to let on. It makes me very nervous in social settings.
I have similar problems. There are very, very few people I keep in touch with regularly. With my closest friends it doesn’t matter as much because it’s easier to pick up where we left off - most of them are online often anyway, so we manage to fill each other in semi-frequently. I vastly prefer online communication anyway because 1) I hate talking on the phone, and 2) it gives the other person the option to respond if and when they want.
I have a horrible problem with this. I am a member of two organizations on campus and other than those people (who I keep in touch with through meetings every week and Thursday night Happy Hour) I hardly contact anyone. It’s not that I don’t like talking on the phone, but the only people I call is my sister or my mother. My wife makes jokes about how many people at the college know who I am but I hardly ever talk to any of them, just a Hello and thats all.
Online communication is great. I have facebook and such just for the fact of networking with old friends and looking at pictures my friends have taken of some of the dumb stuff we’ve done. If it wasn’t for social networking sites such as this, I would be forgotten quickly as I am sociable but don’t attempt to keep in touch.
It’s ok, the most of the people I need to talk to on a regular basis are coworkers, family, and members of the same organizations (for things like money/business reasons and for our weekly social gathering).
I seriously could have written the entire OP… except the friends on the SDMB part, because I’m not only bad at keeping in touch with people, I’m also bad at getting in touch with them in the first place, so I haven’t made any.
I am bad at everything in life which involves me and another person communicating.
I’m horrible at this. I am not in touch with a single friend from high school. I’m in touch with only two friends from college. (And by “in touch”, I know where they are and have emailed with them within the last few months.) I guess it’s because I’ve moved a lot. I think everyone I know should get a LiveJournal, I’d totally be in touch with them then.
The thing is, though, the people who know me well know that I skew heavily towards “loner” and that I’m comfortable going for weeks (and I do mean many weeks) at a time without connecting with people in any deep way, so they don’t (as far as I’m aware) get bent out of shape about it. They know that, should something arise and they need me, I’ll be there for them. Other than that, it doesn’t seem to be a big deal.
Granted, every few weeks or so, I’ll e-mail them just to say, “Hey, out of sight’s not out of mind, etc., etc.,” or they’ll drop me a line to give a quick hello and a mini-update.
But you know what? My friends are busy, too (some have families in addition to their jobs), so it’s not like they have a lot of time for catching up, either. No harm, no foul, y’know?
Like you, I don’t like speaking on the phone much (I prefer in-person contact), so I’m not likely to use that method of communication often, so, yeah, e-mail is a beautiful thing.
And dont feel bad Opal, I think many many people could have written that OP. Not to shirk any blame, but I think it’s partially a product of our fast-lane culture that many contacts get left in the lurch.
I have a friend who I keep in touch with fairly infrequently. I know I should talk to her more because she needs the contact - she’s overworked and stressed, and she’s part of the way through her PhD which is stressing her out even more. The trouble is, she can’t talk to me on an kind of ‘normal’ level. I know she’s concerned about her thesis and stuff, but she knows I don’t have a clue about her subject area…but all she talks about is her research and her work. For hours.
So I’m on the phone to her for four or five hours at a time, listening to her rant about her work and her thesis. There’s no other topic of conversation - she doesn’t go out, she doesn’t socialise, she seems to have no friends in this country (she lived and worked in the US for a while so I get endless stuff about how great Carnegie Mellon is) and I’m the only person she seems to talk to.
But for feck’s sake, woman, could you talk about something else besides how intelligent you are? And can you make a conversation last less than five hours? Can you understand why I’m so reluctant to call you? I just don’t have that much spare time to be on the phone and not doing anything else.
Yeah, makes me a horrible friend, but sometimes I really begrudge her the time.
My mother calls it Pamplona Friendships. It’s something she didn’t understand about Dad until she realized that were he’s from (me too) it’s actually the usual form of friendship.
The notion of “cultivating” and “upkeeping” friendships is just alien to me - to her, the idea of people whom she hasn’t seen or talked to in twenty years offering to house my brother if he didn’t get into a dorm (yep yep, happened) is kind of befuddling, but like she says, “I don’t understand it but I’m not complaining!”
ScareyFaerie see that I can understand, though. For me these are people I really enjoy talking to, I just either don’t have the time or I feel awkward approaching them because I feel like I’ve been neglecting them.
A number of my friends have LiveJournals, but if I were to read my friends page every day to keep on top of what was happening with everyone, I would literally have to spend about four hours every day just reading journals. I just can’t do it. I try to trust that anyone who has something really important happen will let me know so I can go read about it… and from time to time I drop in on specific people’s journals to catch up… but even then I feel like I’m nowhere near “in the loop” in most of my friends’ daily affairs. (It would be different if I lived anywhere close to my friends–I have a handful who live in the same state I do but the rest are all over the country.)
Opal, I can relate to that. I’m lucky enough to have a bunch of friends who are geographically close enough that I can see them fairly regularly and the activity group I belong to has regular pub nights that I can get to if I want to get out and see people.
There are others who I feel I should keep in touch with more often but a lot of the time their name pops into my head and I think “yes, must ring…” then I wonder when is the best time and will they be peeved that I’ve waited so long, and what if we have nothing to talk about. I don’t like phones that much either so face-to-face suits me better, but I can’t get round to see everyone.
I’ve got a few messages in my inbox that I haven’t replied to for about a month – including a cousin who I used as an expert reference for a question on the boards, and a long-lost friend who’s doing a doctorate thesis related to online communities. Plus I went most of last month without talking to my best friend. Plus I’m feeling estranged from my own family (insanely complex story). Etc, etc, etc.
I just plain don’t have the mindset for keeping in touch with people. Either that, or I never learned it, or I lost the skill along the way.
I could say more, but it’s better suited for my therapist.
I lost track of most people I know. I don’t remember names worth shit, so I couldn’t look them up if I tried. I have cousins that married and divorced without even known it. I don’t consider most relatives friends though. I lost all my friends when I got sick anyway. Two years is about the maximum limit for retaining old friends when you get seriously sick.
Ever since I was a kid and moved away from my best friends, we lost touch.
Currently I have a couple of friends, but often I consider my online friends better than some people I know irl. I’ve been friends with them for almost ten years! Yeah we disappear, but eventually we turn up and chat again.
Actually, this has reminded me… I need to call Grandma, and I need to write a letter. I’m making a note to myself eight now so I can do that.
I so much prefer online communication, but most people I know irl either don’t have computers or don’t check their email but every couple months (my cousin here, I love her but she is horrible about answering email… I should see if I have her phone number somewhere.)
Mostly what happens is I go about my life and I look up and think… hey, I haven’t talked to such and such in a bit. When I call them I get asked why I didn’t call earlier, were you mad at me? Ignoring me? We haven’t talked in months! I just don’t think of it. my life is boring, day to day stuff isn’t exciting. I think the only person I talk to regularly on the phone is Nana and she calls us every week. I’d call her less rarely.
At least I’m not out of the loop on family on that side. Otherwise I would be (I know more about what’s happening with Mom’s family and cousins there because of her calls… some of people I’ve never met). On the other hand, Dad’s family is much like me and I seem to be the furthest out of the loop. I was the last to learn when Grandpa was finally buried for example (several months after… he’d been cremated and was buried with his parents the next province over). I wasn’t the only one choked about that though (Dad learned not long before I did… boy was he PISSED).
I like being a hermit though and coming out only every so often.
NO! I could have written that entire post, particularly the following two paragraphs:
I hate the phone, whether it’s calling friends or calling for a pizza. My husband is even worse, so I have to call for food–but then I make him pick it up.
My husband and I are homebodies and enjoy the company of each other or our siblings, but we are so bad about keeping in touch with friends that I’ve let a good friendship slip away in the past couple of years. I know she was probably sick of being the one who always calls.
As for the few high school friends I’ve stayed in touch with, we only see each other a couple of times a year and that’s all we really need to maintain the friendship. We email each other to plan a couple of get-togethers and that’s that. I LOVE EMAIL! There’s no anxiety at all.
I even have anxiety when I get together with a former co-worker. Last weekend, we planned on meeting at the mall and when she was late, I was hoping she wouldn’t show. This particular person is very nice, but we have nothing in common and she talks incessantly and I can’t get a word in.
[hijack] That sounds fascinating! Maybe you’ll tell the Dope about it when it’s done?[/Hijack]
Yep, I’m bad at it. Because I’m an idiot. I’ve been reluctant to put down roots in the last couple of moves so I’ve not pursued possibilities for friendships. However every now and then people pop into my life who are very good about keeping in touch and when someone else makes that much effort, I feel guilty and so try to keep the effort evened up by making efforts of my own.
My home town group of friends are like family. We may not get in touch many times per year but we know we’re friends and always pick up where we left off.
