Friendship on read receipts
Thoughts on turning information into evidence
A strange thing has happened to friendship. Most of it now lives on read receipts.
I know you saw my message. I know you were online four minutes ago. I know you liked someone else’s post since then. I hold that invisible log in my head and try not to admit how much it changes things.
When I was younger, uncertainty looked different. You left a voicemail on a landline and waited. You wrote letters and waited for those, too. The gaps were long and slow. There was no timestamp on a missed connection. People just had lives you couldn’t see.
Now the gaps are small and sharp. You send something and watch the status line change. Delivered. Read. Typing. Nothing. Each signal becomes data to interpret. If you reply fast, you care. Wait too long, and you’re mad, gone, or done. What if they delete the message before you get a chance to read it? Nobody wrote the rules for this. We’re all just guessing.
The trouble with guessing is that it invites stories. My friend doesn’t answer, so I start putting together an explanation. They’re pulling away. They’re annoyed about something I said. I don’t see them in a meeting, driving somewhere, or doing dishes. I see the blank space in the chat window and fill it with whatever my anxiety has available.
I do the same thing, going the other direction. A message comes in, and I feel the weight of someone else’s story forming around me. Answer too fast, and I seem like I have nothing going on. Wait too long, and I seem like I don’t care. I’m not just composing a reply. I’m managing the version of me that lives on their screen.
This would be exhausting with one or two close friends. Most of us have whole stacks of threads. Group chats, old flames, coworkers, family, people we met once at a thing. The app makes no distinction between a crisis and a meme. Everything arrives in the same font, in the same column, asking for the same response: read, process, decide who you want to be right now.
I don’t think friendship has gotten fake. The care is real. But the medium has changed the texture. A lot of my closest relationships are built on small pings throughout the day. Shared links. Inside jokes. Quick check-ins. All good things on their own. The problem is when that becomes the whole thing.
When friendship lives mostly in notifications, it’s easy to confuse activity with depth. A busy thread feels like a strong connection. A quiet one feels like something is wrong. That’s not always true. Some of the best friendships I have are the ones where we disappear for months and pick up as if nothing happened. No penalty for silence. No read receipt as evidence.
I’m trying to treat read receipts as information and not as a verdict. You saw the message. That’s all it says. It doesn’t tell me about your day, your mood, or what you’re carrying. It doesn’t say anything about my worth. That part I have to sort out on my own.
There’s also the surveillance problem. I catch myself checking when someone was last online. Doing the math. Building a case. None of that has ever helped a friendship. It’s just feeding the anxiety, and that anxiety is not a reliable narrator.
The technology isn’t going away. Read receipts will keep existing. Status dots will keep glowing. The part I control is how much of my inner life I hand over to them. I can let them run the show, or I can treat them as background noise and measure my friendships by what happens off-screen. The long talks. The quiet hangs. The feeling of not performing.
I don’t always get this right. I still flinch when I see “read” and nothing. But I’m trying to remember that friendship lives in years, not seconds. A good one is built from a thousand small choices to show up, not a perfect record of fast replies.
cp out.