How to Revive a Friendship

Sometimes, a friendship loses its fire and it’s no longer the way it once used to be. Have no fear; there are effective methods to revive a friendship and make it like new again.

There are plenty of reasons why a friendship can lose some of its strength, although it’s a fulfilling friendship between two compatible individuals: one of you moves to another town, one of you gets married, one of you becomes very busy with work, etc.

Nevertheless, if that friendship is worth having, you can revive it. It may take some time, but if you take the right steps, you can rekindle your friendship and enjoy it to its full potential again. For this reason, my focus here is to detail these proper steps to take.

Intensify Long-Distance Contact

The fundamental change that will revive a friendship is interacting more with the other person. However, if you are not interacting a lot at this time, it’s good to start slowly, by intensifying long-distance contact.

Write the other person an email, contact them on Facebook, start a chat with them on Skype or give them a phone call. Use whatever tools you think will work best to discuss with the other person more and more, and to engage them in longer, more meaningful conversations.

Initiate In-Person Interactions Frequently

If things go well with your long-distance communication and the other person seems interesting in chatting with you like you used to, it’s time to escalate things. At this point, you want to ask this person to hang out with you. And if you’re already doing this but only once in a while, you want to ask them more often.

The essence here is to generate frequent face to face interactions between the two of you. More than anything else, these interactions will revive your friendship. Keep in mind that frequency of interactions is much more important than length.

Manage Logistics

Often, what makes friendships die out is the fact two people who used to hang out a lot are now so busy that they can’t seem to find the time anymore. The mistake they make is that they give up and stop seeing each other.

What they should do and what you want to do is to face this logistical problem head on and despite being very busy, to find ways to meet and hang out. If you’re busy during the week try weekends, if you now live in separate cities try to schedule regular visits. If the friendship is worth it, you’ll find ways to work around the logistical issues.

Acknowledge Changes and Absorb Them

Many times, a friendship slowly dissolves because the two people involved have changed. For example, one of them got married while the other remained a bachelor. However, in lots of cases, these changes don’t truly affect the overall compatibility of these two people.

In other words, the changes don’t need to be a reason to let a friendship die out. You can acknowledge those changes and the fact you’re no longer the persons you used to be, accept this and carry on your friendship from that point forward. As long as you admit the current status and the value of the friendship, you can keep it or you can revive it.

Good friends are hard to find. It’s always good to meet new people and make new friends, but if you also already have one or more really valuable friendships, it’s often worth putting in the effort to keep it going.