How often should you actually reach out to a friend?

A daily-text best friend and a once-a-year university group are both healthy. The mistake is applying one cadence to everyone, then feeling like a bad friend toward the people who simply sit at a slower tempo. Closeness is not the same as frequency. Some of the strongest bonds run on three real conversations a year.

A better question than "how often" is "at what interval does this friendship still feel current?" For one person that is a fortnight. For another it is a season. Name the interval per friend, and the guilt stops being a single vague cloud and becomes a handful of small, answerable questions.

A rough split that works for most people: an inner circle you want to hear from every week or two, a middle ring of monthly-to-quarterly people, and an outer ring you genuinely like but realistically reach once or twice a year. Putting a name in a ring is not a demotion. It is permission to stop measuring a yearly friend against a weekly standard. (The 5-2-1 rule gives these rings a memorable name and a weekly budget.)

The reason cadence fails is not that you stopped caring. It is that an interval longer than a few weeks is invisible to working memory. You cannot feel that it has been eleven weeks since you spoke to someone you love — a problem explored in depth in why adult friendships fade after 30. That is exactly the gap Friendship Tracker fills: you set a reach-out interval per person, and the list quietly tells you who is overdue instead of asking you to hold thirty separate clocks in your head.