On talking terms: Charles Assisi writes on friendships that are revived just once or twice a year

Platitudes, I am starting to see, can really protect a bond. ‘Let’s meet. It’s been too long’ is one of these. Meeting, it turns out, can even do some harm.

I love the festive season. Homes across India are dressed up for Diwali right now. Relatives are visiting each other. Sweets, carefully selected, are being delivered to loved ones.

An endless number of texts are being sent.

What interests me most, in times like these, are the phone calls people make, to people they do not call at any other time of the year. By the end of today, we will all have said, over and over: “It’s been too long. We must meet after Diwali”. This happens around every festival, as well as around birthdays and anniversaries.

What I know by now is that I do mean what I say in these calls, in the way that one means the greeting itself: “I hope you have a good year. Let’s be sure to reconnect”. But I also know neither of us will act to make the meeting happen.

A festival is merely the pretext for the call. “Let’s meet” is what we say so that the pretext doesn’t feel like one. It adds warmth to the conversation, and eases the light embarrassment we feel over how long it’s been since we last spoke.

It is a way to ensure a future for this relationship, without scheduling one. Nobody opens up a diary, and nobody has to say no. Everyone hangs up feeling good, and it all costs nothing. This is a warmer, more hard-working version of the bulk greetings on WhatsApp.

But it has struck me, each time I have said this lately: Why next week? Why not tomorrow? Perhaps because we assume next week will have more time in it. This is a theme psychologists have spent time on. After a study conducted by Gal Zauberman of the Yale School of Management in 2005, he wrote: “Participants believed that both time and money would be more available in ‘a month’ than ‘today’, and believed it more strongly for time than for money.”

Then next week arrives, and it is as full as this one; often fuller.

We tend to call this hypocrisy. I am not sure it is.

In 1990, two psychologists at Stanford University, Ellen Isaacs and Herbert Clark, used an interesting term to describe it: ostensible invitations. They argued that many invitations are just ideas, not intentions. Both people recognise the phrase and purpose.

When we say “Let’s do lunch”, we both mean it and don’t mean it. A courtesy is being exchanged between two people who understand the currency.

Which is why, when we do follow up and make the meeting happen, something often feels off. You may not have as much to talk about as you once did. Too much may have changed. Nothing is wrong, and that is the difficulty of it as well. A quarrel can be diagnosed. This is simply distance.

I have thought, since then, about what the phrase “Let’s meet for lunch” was protecting. I had assumed it was the diary. I now think it was protecting the friendship as it once stood. As long as we said “next week,” we stayed at that point of closeness. It was only on meeting that we learnt how much had changed.

So, as the phone lights up today, I will be saying “Hey, let’s meet”, and meaning it and not meaning it, with a better understanding of why. I will hang up feeling lighter.

It is a good sentence. It has kept a great many friendships intact. On that note, happy Diwali!

(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)