Old-fashioned Sunday afternoons were for visiting. First there was church, then Sunday dinner — a heavy, midday repast (not brunch) — then chatting in the living room or parlor.

Even in memory, these childhood Sundays are interminable. Now I realize what they were for.

Yesterday I spent four hours on the phone. I talked with my mother, my sister, my daughter and my friend. The Sunday phone call is the modern equivalent of the Sunday visit. Because family and friends are far flung, the receiver (and now the smart phone) is the portal of togetherness. It is not ideal, but it is essential.

“A culture wise in love’s ways would understand a relationship’s demand for time,” says Thomas Lewis, M.D., and coauthors in A General Theory of Love. “Americans have grown used to the efficiencies of modern life … why should relationships be any different? Shouldn’t we be able to compress them into less time than they took in the old days? … The unequivocal limbic no takes our culture by surprise.”

So even though I “didn’t get much done” yesterday, I remind myself that there are no shortcuts to closeness. False starts, conversations that go nowhere, simply being available in case a conversation might happen — these are the currency of intimacy.