Like, you aren’t necessarily next door neighbors. You’d have to take the streetcar or bus or commuter rail some distance to go meet your friend. You can’t text “sorry the train is 30 minutes late”, because no cell phones, no internet, no tracking buses or trains on your smartphone. No payphones or landlines.
Letters are only for those cross-continental, cross-oceanic relationships. If you live in the same city, then well you’d still have to meet in person cuz it’s not the digital age, no doomscrolling social media and sending texts and memes.
I feel like those were the days where you could have true friendships in society, not “having friends to send memes”.
Other people have touched on it, but I really want to emphasize how completely ordinary it used to be to go to someone’s house uninvited, unannounced. Well into the telephone age, it was regularly done. And you were expected to always invite them in.
If you wanted to appear to be an at least minimally functional member of society, you would keep some sort of snack food, a cake, cookies, scones, muffins, et cetera, constantly in stock so that you could offer refreshments to literally any person anyone in your household had ever met in their lives, showing up at your door at absolutely any time.
Refreshments were the bare minimum. The further back you go, the more likely your guests were going to want to live with you for a while.
Recently got a friend into anime and he was complaining how unrealistic it was for a unannouced guest to just be invited in, given a spare bedroom and given food and drink no questions asked basically.
To be fair while it was a shit isakai and very nonsense. This bit of it was an extremely accurate depiction.
We were having a fun time picking apart the nonsense of a low effort shit show. But was just funny that out of everything the only thing they got remotely accurate was the hosting manners.