Texting vs Calling a Friend: Why the Call Is Less Awkward Than You Think

There’s probably a friend in your phone you would still call close. You swap texts every week or two, along with photos, birthday wishes and promises to get together soon. You haven’t heard their voice since last year.

Texting keeps that friendship alive, but it doesn’t do much to keep it close. Calling and visiting do that part, and the call you keep putting off will likely go better than you expect.

Texting keeps the thread from breaking

Texting is good at the small, frequent contact that keeps you in each other’s lives. You send a photo of the dog, the song from that road trip, a quick question about how the interview went. It takes you a minute, it fits around work and kids, and your friend can answer whenever they’re free.

In 2011, Oxford researchers Sam Roberts and Robin Dunbar published an 18-month study in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. It followed young people’s friendships through a big life change, the move after finishing school.

Family ties held up better than friendships did. Friendships slipped unless people put in more effort, though the kind of effort that helped differed by gender. For the women it was more talking, while for the men it was doing more things together.

Where texting falls short is warmth, since a text can’t carry your laugh, your tone of voice or the pause before hard news. It also rarely turns into the long, wandering conversation where the bigger news finally comes out.

For a quick check, scroll back through your messages with one close friend and find the last time you heard each other’s voices.

Hearing a voice builds a stronger bond

In 2021, Amit Kumar of the University of Texas at Austin and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago published a set of experiments in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, a journal of the American Psychological Association.

In one, about 200 people thought of an old friend they had lost touch with and predicted how reconnecting by email or by phone would feel. They expected the call to make them feel closer but also to be more awkward. About two-thirds said they’d rather send the email.

The researchers then randomly assigned each person to email or call. The callers felt a significantly stronger bond with their old friend, without feeling any more awkward than the people who emailed.

Strangers felt closer by voice too

In a second experiment, strangers got to know each other by typed chat, audio chat or video chat. The people who heard each other’s voices felt more connected than the people who typed. Adding video on top of voice made little difference.

Neither study tested texting by name. Email and typed chat stood in for it, since all three are words without a voice.

Gouache illustration of two friends on the phone with each other on a sunny morning. On the left, a South Asian man in his late thirties with wavy black hair and a short beard, in a white t-shirt and an open denim shirt, leans on a white balcony railing, laughing with a phone to his ear. On the right, a woman in her early thirties with long wavy dark hair in a low ponytail, in a mustard-yellow cardigan and tan trousers, sits on a brick stoop by a blue front door, laughing with her phone to her ear. — *When the researchers timed the reconnections, a call took about as long as reading and answering an email.*

Kumar summed up the catch in a 2020 news story from his school, the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. “If your inclinations lead you to opt for texting, you will never experience the fact that your expectations could have been wrong,” he said.

Closeness takes hours side by side

Jeffrey Hall, a communication studies professor at the University of Kansas, set out to measure how long friendship takes. His 2018 paper in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships drew on two groups. One was 355 adults who had moved to a new city in the past six months, and the other was 112 college students he followed through their first nine weeks at school.

His estimate was roughly 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to become friends, and more than 200 hours to become close friends.

Hall’s estimates are running totals from the day two people meet, so the 200-plus hours for a close friend include the first 50 and 90.

Not every hour counted the same. Time spent working side by side counted for less than time spent hanging out. Among the students, catching up on each other’s lives, joking around and serious talks moved friendships forward, while small talk about sports or movies didn’t help.

Hall asked about time spent together, so his numbers can’t tell you whether an hour on the phone counts like an hour on the porch.

Catching up is exactly what a call is good at, though. It’s the part a stream of texts rarely gets around to.

Each one does a different job

You don’t have to pick just one. The table below shows how they compare on effort, warmth and the best moment to reach for each one.

Way to stay in touch	Effort	Warmth	Best moment to use it
Texting	Low. A minute, whenever you’re free	Words only, no voice or face	Plans, quick check-ins, a funny photo, a thinking-of-you note
Calling	Medium. 10 minutes or more, both free at once	Voice, tone and laughter	Big news, catching up, a friend far away
Visiting	High. Travel time and a free afternoon	Voice, face and time together	Growing a friendship, celebrations, hard times close by

In Kumar and Epley’s strangers study, typed chat built the weakest connection of the three formats they tested.

In most good friendships, a text sets up the call, and the call is where the next visit gets planned.

Match the tool to the week you’re having

In a busy week, a two-line text that says you thought of them beats waiting for a free hour that never comes.

When a friend lives far away, calls do the work a visit would. A standing slot, like the first Sunday of the month, takes the guessing out of it. If you dread the first call after a long gap, text ahead and ask whether they have 10 minutes on Thursday, so you both know when it starts and roughly when it ends.

When you live close, visit. If Hall’s numbers are anywhere near right, closeness grows out of hours spent together, and a walk, a shared errand or an hour on your stoop all add to the total.

Some people truly dislike the phone, and if your friend is one of them, that’s fine. Ask once whether a call would be welcome. If the answer is no, put your effort into visits and longer messages.

A friend in trouble needs your voice

When a friend is going through something hard, call or show up in person. A text saying you’re there is a kind start. A call adds your voice, which is what built the stronger bond in Kumar and Epley’s studies. On that call, your job is mostly to listen.

If a friend says they’re thinking about suicide or harming themselves, stay with them and call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, together. That is a job for trained people, and you don’t have to carry it alone.

One thing for today

About two-thirds of the people in Kumar and Epley’s study would have sent the email, and the ones who called felt closer without feeling any more awkward.

You can run the same test today. Pick one friend you’ve only texted lately and send a message asking if they have five minutes today. When they say yes, call. Tell them one thing that happened this week and ask about theirs.

If the call runs past five minutes, let it.