When I was in my twenties, a therapist told me that if I got to the end of my life with five friends I could truly bare my soul to, I should consider myself lucky.

I remember thinking that sounded incredibly bleak.

At the time, I took friendship VERY seriously. I didn’t really know how to have casual friendships. We were either in or we were out. If I loved you, I assumed we’d still be doing some version of the same thing when we were 80. The idea that a friendship could be deeply meaningful and still not last forever felt like a contradiction.

Which is funny, because as a child, I understood seasonal friendship perfectly well. Every year when school ended, we packed the car and spent the summer in Rhode Island, where I had an entirely different group of friends from the ones I had at school. They were simply my summer friends. For a few months we were immersed in one another’s lives, and then we went home. Of course, sometimes summer friendships become something more permanent. My friend Karen is still incredibly close with the women she met at summer camp decades ago. They’re now scattered around the world, but every year they meet in a different international destination. They kept choosing one another long after camp was over.

Most summer friendships don’t work that way, and that doesn’t make them failures. Summer has a strange ability to compress intimacy. Within weeks you’re sharing secrets, crushes, inside jokes, and the minutiae of everyday life. Then August comes and everyone goes home. Sometimes you stay close. Sometimes you don’t.

Real estate creates its own version of the summer camp friendship.

A transaction can compress months or even years of getting to know someone into a few incredibly intense weeks. You talk constantly. You learn about their money, their marriage, their children, their fears, and their plans for the future. You see them excited, anxious, irrational, relieved. Then one day everyone hugs at the closing table, the keys change hands, and the thing that brought you together is suddenly over.

I’ve experienced versions of this kind of compressed intimacy throughout my life. Film sets are notorious for it: long, strange hours together, then someone calls wrap, and everyone goes home. Early parenthood was another. Henry’s best friend in preschool was Dylan, and our families became close because our kids were inseparable. Then Dylan moved to New Jersey. There were a Christmas card or two, and eventually we simply stopped talking. Nothing happened. The circumstances changed, and the relationship changed with them.

I’m probably particularly susceptible to this because, if I’m being fair, I’m a little bit “love the one you’re with” when it comes to relationships. Put me in an intense shared experience with someone, and there’s a good chance I’ll feel incredibly close to them. What I’ve gotten better at understanding with age is that intensity and permanence aren’t the same thing. And one isn’t necessarily more meaningful than the other.

We tend to use longevity as proof that a relationship mattered.

But duration and depth are two entirely different measurements.

That distinction matters in real estate. When you’re talking to someone several times a day, navigating high-stakes decisions together and becoming privy to parts of their life most people never see, the relationship is real. But it’s also being held together, at least in part, by a shared experience that has an expiration date.

The conventional business advice is that your job after the closing is to “stay top of mind.” Put them in the CRM. Send the birthday card. Call on the anniversary of their closing. Make sure they remember your name when their friend mentions they’re thinking about moving. None of that is wrong. I just think it misses something more human about what has actually happened. The thing that created the relationship is over.

That doesn’t mean the relationship wasn’t real. It also doesn’t mean the intimacy you experienced during the transaction automatically survives it. Some clients become lifelong friends. Some become wonderful referral sources. Some settle into the kind of relationship where you’re genuinely delighted to hear from one another every few years. And some disappear from your life almost as quickly as they entered it. Maybe the more interesting question isn’t how to keep every client relationship alive. It’s which relationships are asking for another chapter.

Karen and her camp friends didn’t remain close for decades simply because they had an intense experience together one summer. They kept choosing one another after the thing that originally brought them together was gone. They created new reasons to gather. They built traditions. They allowed the friendship to become something other than what it had originally been. A closing doesn’t necessarily end a client relationship either, but neither does the transaction magically sustain it. If there’s going to be another chapter, the relationship needs a reason to exist beyond the thing that created it.

Some relationships survive the experience that created them. Others belong beautifully and completely to that experience. Wisdom may be knowing the difference.

Maybe my therapist wasn’t telling my twenty-something self that most of my friendships would fail. Maybe she understood something I didn’t yet. Five people you can bare your soul to at the end of your life doesn’t mean only five people mattered along the way. There will be summer friends and castmates, colleagues and clients, neighbors and people who appear for one strange, intense chapter and then drift away. Some will stay. Some won’t. Both can leave something behind.

Coaching Corner

Think about your last five clients and, for a moment, forget about your CRM or follow-up plan. What did the relationship actually become after the transaction ended? Which clients became genuine friends? Which relationships naturally evolved into something less intense but still meaningful? Which went quiet the moment the shared experience was over? And, most importantly, which of those relationships do you genuinely want another chapter with?

Not every client needs to become a lifelong friend. But if there are people you truly want to keep in your life, don’t assume the intimacy of the transaction will do that work for you.

If you want another chapter, somebody has to write it.