There is a text I’ve sent almost a hundred times. It’s as tired as I am of sending it. It reads: “Let’s get together soon!”
I always mean it. But I’ve said it enough times now to know what it really is: the kindest way I know to say you matter to me, and I have every intention of figuring out how to spend more time with you later. Sometimes the idea of making one more plan, even a good one, even one I’d genuinely enjoy, feels like more than I can take on.
It’s a social reflex, really. A polite artifact of modern life adopted by everyone. A phrase that sounds like a plan without the inconvenience of actually being one. Full of feeling. Empty of dates. And we keep sending it, because it’s convenient.
With all that we’ve got going on, the people we actually want to see get filed under “soon.” Not because they don’t matter, but because they do, and that makes it even worse. The things that matter most are often the easiest to postpone, because we trust them to still be there when we finally come up for air. So we let the conversation go quiet.
The weeks pass, and the gap between the last time you saw someone and right now starts to feel less like a brief pause and more like a stretch of time that needs to be explained. A quick coffee starts to feel insufficient. A proper catch up requires a whole evening. And a whole evening is harder to find than a quick coffee. So you wait for that too, and the Saturday night keeps moving.
The strange thing is, it doesn’t have to be this hard. The people you keep meaning to see aren’t waiting for a perfect plan. They aren’t tallying the weeks or judging the gap. They’re busy too, filing you under “soon” in their own way, meaning it just as much as you do. The awkwardness you brace for when you finally reach out never actually happens.
The friendship is never the difficult part. The ask is. Or rather, everything attached to it. Is it worth the drive, worth the night, worth clearing the calendar for? Decisions that have to earn all of that start to feel like a production. And productions require planning and time. Time, somehow, never quite arrives.
But what if the invite doesn’t have to be a whole thing? The “let’s get together soon” was never meant to carry all of that weight anyway. It was just meant to be a door left open. It was always meant to be casual.
The casual invitation works best when it’s honest about what it actually is. Not the ideal version of your week. The real one. The coffee that fits into thirty minutes. The errand you’d rather not do alone. The gym class that’s more fun with someone next to you. You don’t need a whole evening to feel close to someone. You just need to be in the same space, doing something real.
A friend and I had been exchanging “soon” for longer than I’d like to admit. And then one morning, she texted asking if I wanted to walk the dogs together before work. No agenda. No food to plan. No house to prepare. Just two people, two dogs, meeting in the front yard and whatever the next forty-five minutes held from there.
On our walk, I found myself realizing how simple it was to just get together. After all, the walk was already happening. The dogs needed to go out regardless. But she made the invitation small enough to actually happen, and that turned out to be exactly enough.
It made me wonder how many walks I’d missed. How many simple, ordinary plans that never happened because I was waiting for the right time, the right weekend, the right version of my week.
The right time for me, it turns out, was an early Wednesday morning with two dogs and forty-five minutes to spare. Maybe it could be for you too?
We’re all behind on the people we love. Life happens and we all know it. But we miss each other too, and that’s worth making the effort for. The ask is almost always easier than we think. Just keep it real. Keep it casual.