In 1974, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann published the theory of the Spiral of Silence, which indicates that people will be less likely to speak on a topic if they feel they have the minority opinion, and this “spirals” outward, silencing all minority opinion holders even if they are actually the majority. 

But there are different kinds of spirals related to communication, too. I was thinking about one of them at work recently. We hired some new people, and one of them was assigned to my team. He seems like a nice enough dude. He’s currently overseas in a two-month training (all of our engineers do this) and according to Teams I haven’t messaged him in almost two weeks. I should probably message him and see how things are going, but it’s already been so long that I would feel weird doing so. 

This happens a lot at work. It’s why I have bi-weekly meetings set up with each member of my team: so that, even if we don’t talk most of the time, we can still catch up and I can get a feel for how the person is doing. 

It also happens with my friends, annoyingly. I recently messaged a friend to tell her I would be passing through her town on the way to Chicago in April, to see if she was interested in meeting up for lunch. I messaged her this in February, and the last time we had talked was in August of last year. Once upon a time we used to talk almost every day, but as time passed we grew apart. We still care very much for each other, but we just keep spiraling into silence and the pressure of contacting someone after a long time grows until it’s unbearable to even consider breaking the silence. 

When I first started branching out into the wider kink community, when I had people I was in dynamics with (even long-distance or rarely-acted-upon dynamics) I used to put notes in my calendar reminding me to contact them every X number of days. But that started to feel forced; like, why was I messaging Person Y every three days? Just to check in, hear that nothing was up, and for our conversations to eventually feel rote and mechanical? I didn’t want that. But they feel that way anyway sometimes; I have certain friends I only message on their birthdays, for example. And there are still others who I don’t message at all but who message me on occasion; clearly they can break the spiral, but I don’t have it in me. 

I suppose the best thing to do is to just keep in touch with my friends on a reasonable cadence, but like I said, rote and mechanical. 

There’s no good answer here. I guess we’ll just stick to following each other’s socials and interacting that way. At least it’s something.