Last week, my best friend and I discovered that her baby (due any day now) wiggles when she plays my voice memos aloud. For years, we've memoed throughout the day as we've lived in different states, but neither of us ever considered that over the past nine months, her little girl might have been quietly familiarizing herself with me: my tone, my "good morning," my "happy Friday."
The whole thing is one of the sweetest, funniest representations of modern friendship that I’ve ever encountered. And it got me thinking about how other women are—or aren’t—connecting with their friends these days.
Almost half of women tell us they have one to three close friends, a number that aligns with Pew Research Center findings from a few years ago.
But they also say they’re busy. Really, really busy. Which makes connecting challenging, sporadic, and way too brief.
“We're all busy being parents,” one respondent said, “and some are more sandwich-generation than others, so we don't have a lot of time to get together. I started sending snail mail to my friends a few years ago. One writes back. Others text me in response. And big hugs when we do see each other, even if it's only in passing.”
I recognized my own life in this comment. My best friends all live in different states, which is its own kind of relationship maintenance, and coordinating gatherings of close friends nearby requires flexibility, grace, and invites sent out weeks in advance. Time and attention feel like adulthood’s scarcest resources.
Yet, the data in our recent friendship poll offered hope, as well as guidance for maintaining friendships even when life feels impossibly full.
Based on our comments, women are remarkably creative in the ways they stay connected. Voice memos become podcasts. Group chats become living rooms. Reels become little thinking-of-yous. Weekly dinners become recurring calendar invites.
But what stood out to me even more than the creativity was the consistency, because it's what I've experienced in my own life, too.
It's easy to assume great friendships require vast stretches of uninterrupted time—a girls' trip, a weekend away, a three-hour dinner. Our respondents suggest something different: what keeps people close isn't the size of the gesture. It's how often the bid for connection appears.
Across the responses, three themes surfaced again and again:
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Regular communication beats occasional big gestures. Sure, we all love an Aperol-fueled heart-to-heart on a poolside patio. It’s Love Island season, after all. But texts, memes, voice notes, and “this made me think of you” messages are the backbone of IRL friendships.
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Adult friendships thrive with structure. That friend who loves to send you a Google Calendar invite? She’s not type A. She’s onto something. Recurring calls, dinners, and meetups sustain friendship far more often than spontaneous hangouts. Sometimes, intimacy is a standing meeting.
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Technology sustains, but it doesn’t replace. Digital tools help all of us stay connected between in-person gatherings, not instead of them. Keep sending the is-it-cake memes—but plan the coffee date, the walk, the dinner, or the trip too, even if it's months away.
If your calendar is packed, this should be a relief. You don't necessarily need more time to maintain your friendships. You need small, repeatable ways to show up for one another—to accumulate "good mornings" and memes until, almost without noticing, you have a shared life.
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