What makes a tie last at a distance

Surveys find an association between contact frequency and reported closeness, but it is moderate and it weakens with the age of the relationship. Frequency mainly measures the place a relationship holds in daily organisation: one often sees those one runs into at work or in the neighbourhood.

Long-standing relationships are often maintained with infrequent contact, which makes frequency uninformative for that part of the network, precisely the part surveys seek to describe.

Analyses of communication data find that the regularity of contact, that is the stability of its rhythm, predicts the persistence of a tie better than the total number of exchanges.

Work by Jari Saramäki and colleagues based on eighteen months of call records shows that the structure of a person's contact hierarchy is stable, while the identity of those occupying it changes. The authors speak of a social signature, found among young adults moving from secondary school to higher education.

Interview surveys describe relationships able to resume after years without contact, two people quickly recovering a shared register. That property has no standard measure and escapes frequency instruments.

It is sometimes approximated by questions about the anticipated ease of resumption, a hypothetical measure whose validity is not established. It raises a fundamental question: a relationship can exist without activity, which most instruments are unable to represent.

Work on maintaining ties at a distance finds a frequent asymmetry: in a majority of relationships, the initiative for contact is taken by the same person.

That asymmetry is not associated with shorter duration in the available data, which contradicts the idea of a necessary reciprocity of initiatives and raises the question of what declared balance actually measures.

Several readings remain possible. The asymmetry may reflect a difference in availability, an implicit division of roles, or simply the fact that one of the two keeps the calendar. None is established as dominant, and the data do not allow a choice between them.

Relationships maintained through recurring appointments, weekly or annual, appear more durable in several surveys, because contact there does not depend on a decision to be taken. A birthday, an end-of-year meal or a shared holiday plays that role.

That finding echoes work on contexts: what maintains a tie is most often an external arrangement, not a renewed intention. It does not mean that a tie without appointments is more fragile, as the long-standing relationships described above show the opposite.