We don't always keep in touch often after all those years, because we have busy life to lead to bring up families and back in olden days we only contact through snail mail which slowly dwinded to less and less.
Then we bought ourselves fax machines and it was always long pages each.
Since we both finally buy computers, we contact each other pretty much every day with shorter messages but know we can be online to chat.
Perhaps I think the long distances between us helps keep us friends longer, who knows?