Same old scene?

If catch-ups with friends have become a tad predictable, here’s how to change them up and create new shared memories again

‘How’s work?’ asked Easton, sitting across from a friend she’d known for years, as they caught up over coffee. ‘Busy, but good!’ replied her friend. ‘You?’

‘Oh, same. Just trying to juggle it all.’ Easton Gaines, a 31-year-old psychologist based in New York City, couldn’t put her finger on it, but something had been off about their meet-ups of late.

‘We were talking, but we weren’t connecting,’ says Easton. ‘We were looping through the highlight reel, staying in the safe zone. This wasn’t the friendship we used to have. We had drifted – not because we didn’t care, but because we’d fallen into a pattern of updates instead of engagement. It felt like we were preserving the friendship instead of participating in it. And that loss of depth? It was lonely.’

What Easton and her friend had fallen into isn’t uncommon. It might be called the friendship catch-up trap – a situation where friends inadvertently fall into a routine of quick, surface-level catch-ups rather than creating new memories together or bonding on a deeper level. It can be a far cry from those younger years – school, university, first jobs, first flatshares – when dates with friends were more frequent and, often, more event-filled – think festivals, movie nights, road trips, fancy-dress parties. With age, however, come different and additional responsibilities, and seeing a friend becomes a routine, akin to living separate lives and meeting up every now and then to swap details of them, rather than creating new memories together.