Amelia Lester

Or do you think that some of these other sort of defenses of the reply only friend do hold water?

Okay, in defence of reply-only friends.

Good, because I am not, so I want to hear the defence.

Because I feel the same way as Tig.

I feel like sick of always putting in the effort and it's hard not to take it personally when they just never meet me and they never take the initiative with me.

But, Claire, devil's advocate.

Do you not think you could be the one to say, let's have dinner, you pick the restaurant, I'm bad at it?

Oh, yeah, I love this.

When someone doesn't deserve a friend, that's when they need the friend the most.

Yeah.

I think that's relevant to this conversation because sometimes someone can really be going through something and they just cannot be there for you in the same way.

They cannot be reaching out to you.

And I think that's a really valid point.

And it's sort of a caveat to the idea that reply only friends and not worth the effort.

That's interesting.

It sparked something in me that I have one friend who is in Atlanta but is not anywhere near where I am living right now.

In fact, she's not in Australia.

And she texted me this morning, are we still doing underwire bras?

And if you'd scrolled up in our conversation, we probably spoke two weeks ago about something completely different.

That kind of friendship where you can just go straight in with the random remark is how you keep a friendship alive over many years and across big distances.