The half-life starts at graduation

This essay first appeared in The Stir, our every-other-week newsletter, on October 3, 2026. You can join at simmer.social/stir.

You are probably worrying about the wrong problem when it comes to losing touch.

The finding

In 2003, psychologists Debra L. Oswald and E. M. Clark followed high school best friends through their first year of college and published the results in Personal Relationships. The friendships lost ground on nearly every measure the researchers tracked: satisfaction, commitment, investment. The pairs that stayed best friends were doing something different: positivity, support, self-disclosure, and plain old interaction.

Then the detail that earns this study its spot in your inbox: how far apart the friends lived made no measurable difference. How often they communicated did.

Why it matters

If you finished an MBA or an EMBA, somebody sold you the network as part of the price of admission, and they were not wrong. Half the degree is the people. The worry comes later: the quiet suspicion that the asset started depreciating the day the program ended.

Here is the reframe the study offers. Distance gets the blame for drift, and distance is the one thing you cannot fix. The study points somewhere else. The decay tracked silence, and silence is the one variable entirely in your hands. Nobody has to move back, and the maintenance behaviors the researchers observed cost minutes: a message, a real answer, a question that shows you remember.

One thing to do this week

Message one classmate you have not spoken to since the program ended. Reference the last thing they told you, so the thread picks up in the middle instead of starting over. Something like: "Still thinking about that idea you pitched over drinks at graduation. Did it survive contact with reality?" One person, one message, this week.

We read the study so you don't have to. If you want it anyway, it is Oswald and Clark, Personal Relationships, 2003.