Connections between people fade over time. Does this seem obvious to you? It's obvious to me, and it's perhaps less obvious to some people I know. But even though it seems obvious to me, it's still difficult or perhaps impossible for me to explain why connections fade over time, but a select few don't. I know some people who I still feel very connected with, even if I don't speak or interact with them. The number is small enough to count with one hand though. For most people I know, I will feel closer to them if I interact with them more, either by doing stuff with them in daily life, talking to them, or chatting with them online. Still sounds reasonable, doesn't it? I'm guessing we all recognize this. But then, what happens when such a connection, into which both parties have invested a lot of time and effort, stagnates and/or breaks down? Here I think is where individual reactions might be different. In particular, some people I know don't consider a connection to ever break down at all: once a connection is at a certain level, it can only go stay stable or go up, but it can never go down. I am not this kind of person. For me, when a connection stagnates because of lack of activity it gets cut off. It may be reconnected later, but at a much lower level than before. It bothers me if for me a connection has been lost (or is at a much lower level than before) while the other party acts as if we only met yesterday, even though it's been ages since we did anything together. This, by the way, rarely happens in my life. Most of my close friends have similar opinions on this topic, and we can comfortably pick up a connection even years after it's lost. I'm quite happy about that. Though on a rare occasion, when a connection mismatch happened to me, I did feel the need to write about it.
I guess I just wanted to make things clear for myself. No matter what kind of connection I've had with people in the past, I don't focus on that. What matters is the present, here and now. Some connections don't fade, but others do. Don't be surprised when other people place a different value on your mutual connection.