You might want to stop sending your friends so many voice notes.

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In the past year, I've realised that some of my closest friendships don't actually exist in real life.

They live inside a green chat bubble, a stream of five-minute audio notes, sent on the go, squeezed between work, gym, and dinner prep. We talk every day, yet rarely see each other.

At first, I thought it was a connection. That feeling of hearing a familiar voice in your ears on the drive home. That soft intimacy of someone saying, "Oh my god, wait till you hear this," before launching into the story of their day. But then something shifted.

Watch Amelia and Holly on Mamamia Out Loud. In this episode, they discuss 'satellite friends'. Post continues below.

The monologue friendship.

I started noticing a pattern. People, myself included, were sending monologues, not conversations.

We'd pour out five or six minutes of thoughts, feelings, and frustrations, then disappear for hours. When the reply came back, it wasn't really a response, just another standalone update. Two people venting into the same chat thread, never really listening to each other.

With one friend, it became a daily ritual. She'd send long voice notes about her work dramas, family problems, or all the drama as a step-mum. I'd listen while doing the dishes, trying to mentally list all the things I wanted to respond to.

By the end, I'd be exhausted, not because I didn't care, but because it wasn't a conversation anymore. It was homework.

So I suggested we talk on the phone. Maybe while I drove home from work. A real chat, you know?

She never picked up. "I'm not a phone person," she'd say. "Just send me a voice note."

And that's when it clicked: she didn't want to talk with me, she wanted to talk at me.

The illusion of intimacy.

It happened again with a long-time friend, someone I've known for more than a decade. After his breakup, we reconnected through daily voice notes, long, rambling updates that felt like comfort. Until we met up in person.

I was shocked by how awkward it felt. He kept cutting me off mid-sentence. He'd jump from one topic to another, just like in the voice notes, where I never had to interrupt. And it hit me: we'd trained ourselves for one-way communication.

Voice note friendships are low-effort intimacy. You get to feel close without the vulnerability of being challenged, interrupted, or asked follow-up questions. You don't have to see someone's face when they disagree or ask, "But why do you feel that way?"

It's connection without friction.

The new convenience of friendship.

Everyone's tired. Everyone's busy. We crave connection but can't bear the emotional bandwidth it requires. So we settle for these asynchronous audio diaries, fragments of friendship we can consume when convenient.

But here's the catch: when friendship becomes too convenient, it also becomes fragile.

You can't truly know someone through monologues. You can't build empathy when you only ever listen on 1.5x speed.

Friendship, real friendship, lives in the messy middle, the pauses, the interruptions, the uncomfortable silences, the "wait, tell me more." And I'm starting to wonder if, by replacing conversations with voice notes, we're not just saving time, we're losing depth.

So… is this the new friendship?

Maybe.

Maybe this is what connection looks like in 2025, less face-to-face, more voice-to-voice. Maybe these audio messages are the modern version of letters: imperfect, delayed, full of emotion.

Listen to this episode of Mamamia's But Are You Happy? on when to walk away from a friendship. Post continues below.

But I can't shake the feeling that something's missing. That listening, really listening, is becoming a lost art.

And that if friendship is supposed to make us feel seen and heard, we might need to start pressing call instead of record.

Gabriela started as a journalist and somehow ended up deep in the world of online search behaviour. Her friends know her as the one who can't resist starting a chat with, "I don't want to get too philosophical, but…"

Feature image: Canva.