More frequent contact = closer friend?

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Say if I had a friend who I heard from nearly every day and I had another friend who I only heard from occasionally, would it be safe to say that I was closer to the friend I heard from more often?

Are frequency of contact and connection/closeness correlated with one another?
Is a friend you hear from every day a good friend? Is a friend you hear from occasionally only an acquaintance?

Backstory: I have this....."friend", who only talks to me like once every three weeks. While he says he values the friendship and wishes to talk to me more often, due to the delay he takes in getting to me I don't feel all that close to him (online friend that is. He's a dating site potential too but I don't want a BF I only hear from once every three weeks).

Please discuss. Experiences. Share & stuff.

Not for me. Once a person is categorized as friend they will remain there unless they do something to lose my respect. It depends on the type of interaction you have as well. You could talk to someone for years but never get to know them because you interact only on a superficial level and never get real with each other.

On the other hand meeting a good friend once every two months has interaction that goes a lot deeper for me. Basically once you get past a certain stage you won't have to bother with that type of interaction ever again and move straight to the real stuff. While you never get past that initial stage with most people even though you interact daily. 1 hour could be more valuable then talking a whole week about BS.

I agree with TB. I have hearing problems and so rarely speak with anyone on the phone and my best girlfriend lives 3000 miles away so we see each other one week per year and email once-in-a-while. We bond more in that one week than I do with friends I see on a weekly basis.

not always.

if your frequent contact is because of a contrived setting such as a classmate or co-worker, it is not necessarily more meaningful.

sometimes you can be very close friends with someone, and only get to spend a little time with them but the time you spend is magic.

Well, for me, frequent contact is necessary at the early stages of a friendship, because it's the time when you get to know each other, find things in common, and start having some sort of "history" together. Once a strong base has been established though, contact is not that important. I agree with TB's post, once a friend always a friend unless something big happens, and I've found that when you don't meet with someone very often (one of my high school best friendslives in another city, amd we get to see each other around twice a month on holidays, and not at all while studying) when you actually meet there is a lot to catch up, so you aren't stuck smalltalking, it's just really important things.

It's important to point out that how often you see each other is related with how easy it is. If you live in the same city, and it is relatively easy to make an appointment, then they may resent it if you don't. I make it a point to at least phone those people I want to keep in my life, to stay on the radar and eventually meet up.

I'd say in some cases yes but a lot of the time, not always. Say if you are friends with someone at school or in your workplace, you see them everyday and you probably talk everyday but that doesnt mean you are closer friends to them then to say someone that lives in another state who you might just speak to once a month. It defienetly varies based on what your doing with your life and the everyday occation's and events that are bringing you together is how often you might communicate with someone. People have varying degrees in which they define closeness. In some cases, people are bad at maintaining contact in general. So you might have a really close friend that is bad at maintaining contact and you have contact once every six months. That doesnt make them any less of a friend. Closeness is sorta of an abstracted concept that aspies have a hard time wrapping their mind around. There's many varying of criteria, but its the feeling you and other person have that you just kinda know: well NTs that is. For me, I often define closeness by depth of conversation, comfort level with the person, things you can do with them and how enjoyable their company is.

Well, relationships confuse me, so this is all theory for me too.

There was a nifty concept floating around in the 60s with all the hippies and communes and counterculture movies and drugs and alternative spiritualities, that beneath all of the phoniness and fluff,self-consciousness and imperfection of communication, there's a true spirit within each person that's unworded and can only be perceived or communicated through extreme withdrawal from fakeness . . . and there was a belief that if two people could bring their souls into contact with one-another then they would for that moment attain a connection that is absolute. And they called this magical awesomesauce connection Ground Zero. I don't think people believed this connection could be sustainably attained, (though they thought they could catch glimpses of it through their efforts with drug use etc.), but apart from the communism/environmentalism/radical-feminism/plain-ol'-vagrancy, all of their withdrawal and sacrifices were aimed at making their human connections closer.

It's a lovely idea. It's mawkish enough that the slightest bit of cynicism just destroys it, but it's also an idea simple enough that you can quietly hope for it yourself. It's something I aspire to.

I think relationships become closer when you are able to bring more of your true self into them, when you catch glimpses of people as they don't normally portray themselves to others, and when the disparate knowledges/ transplanted prejudice/associations you've been using to understand them gradually become replaced by an understanding derived purely from what you know about the friend. It definitely correlates with knowing them for longer, but it arrives in moments that make you re-evaluate your understandings of them and as a result understand them far more deeply. It takes either an effort at closeness, or more likely a moment where both people forget their fear of closeness.

Umm, you might have heard of the idea that you're a different person to every person you encounter, because they are forming their perception of you from a different set of information and a different set of associations they bring to everything they learn about you. And since each one of these conceptions of you is complete -- they've projected some vision of you that accounts for a good portion of your humanity -- new knowledge people learn about you has a manner of contradicting and correcting what they already know. So in that sense humans as understood by others are like a massive suspension of accumulated contradictions . . . they only seem to account for something lovely and real when you can perceive/believe that they are revolving around some core. I think that with a closer friend you have a perception of who they are at the surface by also a deeper sense of who they really are. It definitely only comes with knowing someone for a long time, and through different contexts, that make their imperfections more apparent to you. And the imperfections are where the human-ness/beauty that's so worthwhile to seek out in others is found.

Umm, if you've read this far here is a favourite short story of mine by Gabriel Garcia Marquez about relationships:
http://fiction.eserver.org/short/eyes-o ... e-dog.html

Obviously I'm rambling, and I'm cutting through some questionable/dis-reputable subject areas to arrive at my thought so it's purely for you to ponder over.

Well i have a friend right now, who is really busy with school and volunteerswork so i don't get to see her a lot maybe about once every 3 months but we do have contact every week and we share things, anyway before we became we friends we saw each other every day and we always had a fight about anything really :o But eventually after she left the place we both went to, i offered her to stay in touch because before she left our contact was improving and now we're friends, so i guess it depends on the person, so even when you see and talk to a person everyday it can mean a lot or it can mean nothing, and now i'm thinking too deep and i'm starting to get incoherent so i'll stop now ><

Anyway have a nice day :o