4 Ways to Strengthen Long-Distance Friendships

Modern life is mobile, in every sense of the word. Many of us work remotely, have jobs that require travel, move to new cities for opportunities like school or work, or return home to care for family after years away. What happens to the friends we’ve made? Can we still keep those friendships going?

Are those long-distance friendships worth the effort in the first place?

Mental health professionals say yes, emphatically. Old friendships are crucial to well-being for two key reasons. First, they help you remember and reconnect with good things in your past. Second, because they’ve known you so long, they can help you through life crises in ways newer friends can’t, especially if the life crisis involves a family member or shared friend.

At Myrth, we think there’s a third reason: those old friends know you inside and out, so they are best positioned to help hold you accountable. That’s essential for making lasting, meaningful change in your life.

1. Focus on maintaining emotional closeness in your friendship, even if literal closeness isn’t possible.

“Friendships can survive and even thrive across long distances, so long as you work to maintain emotional closeness—those bonds between friends that are sustaining and fulfilling.”

Friendships are easy to sustain when you live down the hall in the same dorm building or work in the same office. You can call each other up at a moment’s notice or swing by each other’s office to grab a quick coffee and chat. 

When one of you moves away, though, maintaining closeness requires more effort. You need to be prepared to put in the work when talking to each other sometimes requires scheduling and planning. If you can do that, though, the effort pays off.

As Anne Moyer, Ph.D., a Stony Brook University professor of psychology and scholar of friendship, told Refinery29 recently, research is starting to show that friendships are less fragile and more flexible than we thought. Friendships can survive and even thrive across long distances, so long as you work to maintain emotional closeness--those bonds between friends that are sustaining and fulfilling.

That means talking about more than just the lighthearted things in your day. Be open, honest, and vulnerable with your friend about the good and bad things happening in your life, and ask about the same things in their lives. However you decide to communicate with each other, whether it’s by phone or text or Twitter DM, make sure that you’re communicating deeply. Hold each other accountable (something we really care about here at Myrth), celebrate when things go well, and give comfort when they don’t.

2. To keep a friendship strong, don’t just dwell in the past. Build new memories together.

Friendships are a lot like plants. If you don’t give them fresh water and nutrients, it won’t matter how well you took care of them previously--they’ll wither. 

To keep your friendship robust and healthy, you need to feed it new experiences. They don’t have to be big ones, but you need to give yourselves new reasons to connect with each other, new things to talk about, and new memories to sustain your friendship going forward.

“To keep your friendship robust and healthy, you need to feed it new experiences. They don’t have to be big ones, but you need to give yourselves new reasons to connect with each other, new things to talk about, and new memories to sustain your friendship going forward.”

Irene Levine, Ph.D., who teaches psychiatry at NYU and studies friendships, told The Cut that “it’s important to create something you share with the other individual, not just exchanging information about the differences in your life.”

That means it’s important to try to find time to get together when you can, even if just for an hour between stops on a road trip or a quick visit between work meetings while you’re in from out of town. If you can’t get together in person often, try finding other experiences you can share by doing them at different times and then comparing notes, or things you can do remotely together. More on that in a moment.

3. Get creative when finding new ways to connect with each other. 

Years ago, one of our Myrth team members and her best friend found themselves living over a thousand miles apart, both deeply stressed out in graduate school and not handling it well. They couldn’t get together for tea and a good, in-person chat anymore, so they embarked on a long-distance self-care project. They started a spreadsheet that they saved in a shared location, chose goals for the week (like drinking enough water each day or going for a half-hour walk or meditating each morning), and checked in every evening on their spreadsheet. In fact, it was awfully similar to how Myrth works nowadays (though much lower-tech, of course).

See, sometimes, you have to get creative to maintain your friendship across distances. 

We love the story in this New York Times piece about two best friends, separated for the first time in their lives, who had always collaborated on artistic projects. They started mailing and emailing pieces of art, song snippets, photographs, and other creative projects, which kept both their friendship and their collaborative efforts strong.

To sustain your own long-distance friendship, think about some fun and funny ways to maintain your connection with your long-distance friend. Do they love a certain food? Use something like Postmates or Uber Eats to deliver it to them when they’re having a rough day at work. You can commit to watching a documentary or reading a book together, invent a running inside joke that gives you excuses to text more often, or start a self-improvement project together that requires regular check-ins (ahem, we know a great platform that can help with that). 

4. Practice Self-Care

You can’t show up for friends near or far if you’re totally depleted, so self-care is crucial! Because of the physical separation involved, long-distance friendships really thrive on emotional connection, vulnerability, and support for each other. That means you need to be in a place where you can give and receive that kind of emotional care.

We’ve talked before about how self-care is so important to maintaining personal well-being. Having your long-distance friendships to maintain is another good reason to take care of yourself. Remember: you can’t pour from an empty cup. You just can’t.

Have you successfully maintained a thriving, long-distance friendship? We’d love to hear some of your strategies for doing so! Leave us a comment below with some tips and tricks.