Maintaining relationships in the modern world

In my Internet errands came accross this article where the author points out the amount of sollicitation and notifications caused by nowadays social apps and networks and the impact on one's mental health.

While I partially understand this, there's a conflation really bothering me in the article between social medias expectations versus giving news to friends. People care about you, reach out to take some of your news, to see you, ... those are not social medias apps, those are human relationships waiting to be fertilised.

We all have our ups and downs, we all have some time when we want to shut the world down and do so. My problem lies when not answering for weeks (not talking about hours or days, weeks!) becomes part of your character and "just who you are".

And this is where I disagree with the author, there's a giant difference between the "always available" expectations of social medias apps and repeateadly waiting weeks to answer to a friend, the second being wanting to build / maintain / keep some relationship.

Not answering repeatedly is not "an answer", it's a clear sign you either don't care or don't want to entertain a relationship with the other person. You can't expect the other side to always be the iniating one if you value a relationship.

During the last three years I had to learn, the hard way, to give up on several relationships. Because I was the one maintaining them for years, always the one to reach out, trying to organise, giving news, ... I realised how deeply it hurt me that those friends never reach out. Not out of malice, but simply because they were, I quote, "bad at giving news".

I'm sad for the friends I've lost, I'm longing for some news from them, but the energy it took me to keep those relationships alive was just exhausting and slowly became a source of hurt of the years. And no friendship is worth this amount of hurt.

The reality is that a big part of adults are just bad a maintaining relationships. Is it increased by social apps and our smartphone? Perhaps. But it's also an easy culprit for one's behavior and an easy pass that I see used more and more.

Relationships are a two way streets, you can hide behind "I'm just like that" but don't act surprised when you end up alone in the end because you left all the weight of your friendships on the others.

And when people then come back after years of absence saying "why did you stop giving news?", I just want to shout "because you hurt me, time and time again, when I was trying to build something".

P.S.: There's a reason my favourite Pok��mon (and the only one I got as a tattoo) is Togepi, as its Pok��dex entry says: "As its energy, Togepi uses the positive emotions of compassion and pleasure exuded by people and Pok��mon. This Pok��mon stores up feelings of happiness inside its shell, then shares them with others."