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”.
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.