The Problem of Low-Maintenance Friendships
Low-maintenance friendship has become somewhat of a social ideal. It’s praised as one of the most evolved form of connection: the kind where months pass without speaking, yet nothing changes; where no one asks for too much; where absence is proof of maturity rather than neglect. In a culture obsessed with efficiency and emotional minimalism, low-maintenance friendship sounds great. But it is also, increasingly, a problem—one that often disguises distance, fear, or quiet loss as emotional sophistication.
I met Alina in school in Prague, at an age when friendships feel provisional, like something you borrow from circumstance rather than choose deliberately. We were thrown together by schedules and unground chemistry lectures and coffee between lectures, by the small intensity of being young in a city that didn’t quite belong to us yet. Eleven years have passed. What I remember most from those early days is repetition: walking the same streets, having the same conversations in different forms, rewatching the same shows, going to the same bars, traveling to the same countries, sleeping in the same bed.
Over the years, life kept trying to pull us into separate directions. She left for a semester in China—months of time zones and delayed replies, of photos from a life I wasn’t part of. I fell into a relationship that reshaped my days, my priorities, my emotional bandwidth. Later, she had her own relationship, with its own gravity. Then I had a child, a rupture in time so complete that everything before it feels like a previous life.
And yet, the friendship survived and, dare I say, thrived. Not because it was low-maintenance, but because it wasn’t. We allowed the friendship to change shape without pretending it hadn’t. We let the friendship age. We let it stretch to include new lives, new friends (an amazing group of girlfriends!), and new responsibilities. Eleven years later, the friendship holds more than memories. It holds proof that closeness doesn’t disappear when life expands if you’re willing to expand with it, that friendship isn’t something you outgrow, but something you grow into. Now, looking back, it’s clear that what began as coincidence became one of the most intentional relationships of my life.
At its core, friendship is maintenance. It is attention paid over time. It is remembering, checking in, noticing shifts in tone, life, or energy. Calling a friendship low-maintenance suggests that care is optional, that intimacy can exist without effort. Yet the friendships that truly last are rarely effortless; they are simply reciprocal. They feel easy not because nothing is required, but because what is required is willingly given.
Having high-maintenance friendships is not only important, it’s essential to human wellbeing. There is a lot of data to support that claim.
The 2023 Frontiers in Psychology systematic review on adult friendship and wellbeing analysed 38 studies published between 2000 and 2019 and found a clear, consistent link between friendship and psychological wellbeing. The review shows that wellbeing is associated not just with having friends, but with friendship quality and maintenance, including emotional closeness, supportive responses (especially when sharing positive events), autonomy support, and active efforts to sustain friendships. Adults with higher-quality, more engaged friendships reported greater life satisfaction, vitality, and feelings of being valued and connected. The findings emphasise that friendships contribute to wellbeing through ongoing interaction and care, not passive or purely symbolic connections.
It becomes most visible when life grows heavy. Illness, grief, parenthood, heartbreak, creative crisis—these are not low-maintenance states. They demand presence, even if that presence looks imperfect. When a friendship collapses under these pressures, it does so because someone needed more than the other was willing or able to give.
There is also a power dynamic hidden in the phrase. Low-maintenance friendships often benefit the person with more control over time, energy, or emotional bandwidth. To be “easy” is frequently expected of the one who fears being a burden. The one who adapts. The one who learns not to ask. Over time, this can hollow out the relationship, turning it into something polite, nostalgic, and strangely distant, maintained in name, but not in practice.
This is not to say that constant communication defines closeness. Adult life is busy, scattered, and uneven. Real friendship allows for gaps, forgiveness, and flexibility. But there is a difference between spaciousness and neglect. Spaciousness still contains intention. Neglect is simply absence rebranded as understanding.
The study “Responsiveness, Social Connection, Hope, and Life Satisfaction in Everyday Social Interaction” (Journal of Happiness Studies, 2024) examined how perceived responsiveness in daily social interactions relates to wellbeing. Using an experience sampling method over ten days with 120 participants, the researchers found that moments when people experienced others as responsive, supportive, attentive, and caring, were linked to greater feelings of social connection (shocker!), which in turn predicted increases in hope (though not directly life satisfaction). They also observed reciprocal patterns throughout the day: responsive interactions boosted social connection, and feeling socially connected encouraged more responsiveness. These results suggest that small, everyday responsive communication across one’s social network plays a meaningful role in fostering social connection and supporting a more hopeful outlook on life.
The paper “How many hours does it take to make a friend?” by Jeffrey A. Hall (it’s a great read!) investigated how time spent together, shared activities, and everyday conversation relate to friendship closeness. Across two studies—one with adults who had recently relocated, and another with first-year college students followed over nine weeks—the research found that it takes roughly 40-60 hours of time together to move from mere acquaintance to casual friend, 80-100 hours to go from that stage to simple friend status and more than 200 hours before you can consider someone your close friend.
Hall believes that a person’s brain can only handle about 150 friendships (I still have a long way to go!), and that “the amount of time and the type of activity shared with a partner can be thought of as strategic investments toward satiating long-term belongingness needs.”
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is one of the longest-running scientific research projects in the world, tracking people’s lives over 80+ years to understand what predicts healthy, happy, meaningful lives. It began in 1938 and has followed two original groups of participants, the Grant Study (Harvard students) and the Glueck Study (men from Boston neighborhoods), into old age and now into their children’s generation, making it a multi-generational study. The research asks questions about psychological, social, and biological factors from childhood through late adulthood to see how life experiences, especially relationships, influence physical health, mental wellbeing, and successful aging.
What was found:
Strong, supportive relationships are the strongest predictor of wellbeing. The research consistently finds that people who maintain close relationships with family, partners, friends, and community are happier, physically healthier, and live longer than those who are socially isolated.
Relationship quality often matters more than wealth, fame, IQ, or career success in predicting long-term health and happiness; people with stable emotional connections have better mental health and resilience to stress.
Preliminary analyses suggest that loneliness can be as harmful as major health risks (comparable to smoking or alcoholism) because it raises stress and undermines physical wellbeing, whereas meaningful connections protect health over the lifespan.
Actively maintaining relationships, not just having them in name, is crucial: good relationships must be nurtured over time to yield lasting benefits for health and wellbeing.
Friendship is not a house that stands forever without repair. It is more like a garden: some seasons require less tending, others more. Calling it low-maintenance may sound appealing, but data—and lived experience—suggest otherwise. What sustains friendship is not how little it asks of us, but how willing we are to answer when it does.
Why you want to have high or medium maintenance friendships:
They measurably improve wellbeing. Friendship quality, active maintenance, and supportive interactions are consistently linked to higher life satisfaction, vitality, and psychological wellbeing.
Feeling noticed, understood, and cared for in everyday interactions increases social connection and hope, while low-effort or sporadic contact does not produce the same effects. Responsiveness builds real connection.
Time investment creates closeness.
Actively maintained friendships are more likely to survive major changes like parenthood, illness, relocation, or grief, when emotional support is most needed.
Having a few well-maintained friendships predicts lower loneliness better than having many weak or infrequent connections.
Maintenance encourages mutual effort and shared responsibility, preventing emotional labor from falling disproportionately on one person.
Friends who show up and engage regularly reinforce a sense of being valued, remembered, and mattering to others.
They age better. Long-term studies show that actively sustained relationships are the strongest predictors of happiness and health over time.
Loneliness kills. It’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.
Robert Waldinger, psychiatrist, Massachusetts General Hospital
Fantastic piece. That Hall study finding about needing 200+ hours for close friendship really puts into perspectiv why "low-maintenance" doesn't work longterm. I've had friendships drift into that "polite nostalgic" zone and its exactly because we stopped doing the work. The power dynamic point is spot on too, always seemed to fall on the person with less bandwidth.
Thank you for outlining the issues with neglect in friendships so well. A great reflection and honestly made me feel seen in a time of rebalancing a friendship where ive given too much over the years. The reciprocity in vulnerability and emotional connection is key.