Before landlines, you'd write them a letter to arrange a meeting.
The mail was delivered up to 4 times a day depending on where you lived.
And since only one family member (generally the father) had to work to support the family, there was almost always someone home.
So another option would be to simply visit them unannounced at a time you knew they'd be there.
In many regions, it would have been normal to simply walk in to a friend's house, even without knocking.
Also, you'd know this person from somewhere. Somewhere you met.
Either at work, or at a club, or a union meeting, or a pub. You get the idea.
So you'd see them regularly in person, cause otherwise you wouldn't get to know them in the first place.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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My grandparents told me stories of how they'd have regular times and places. My grandpa told me stories of meeting up with his boys on Saturday mornings at the synagogue, and then going out and about. They'd sometimes park cars for folks, and sometimes take them on unauthorized joy rides. Occasionally folks would borrow a car that no one asked them to park, since apparently I guess folks left keys in cars regularly.
This was in Pittsburgh, and from what I gather captures the experience of the life of a Jewish teenager in the twenties and thirties pretty well.
There was a lot of hanging out on street corners and stoops, and just looking for friends at their regular candy shop/soda joint/pool hall, etc.
It sounds fuckin' wild, tbh. My grandma says she'd take the bus across town in high school to meet up with her boyfriend and I was like, 'Was that at all seen as daring or risky? For a young unaccompanied woman to be out like that?' Apparently not. Folks could really hang.
I don't know how this relates outside of specific cultures, though. Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X gave me the sense that a lot of experiences were different depending on race, but just rolling up to your friends' houses, places of work, or regular hangout spots seems to have been pretty universal.
Btw, PSA: Grandparents are a treasure. If you have any, call them today and ask them what they liked to do on a Saturday when they were 17. It was probably pretty dope.
That was still universal when I was a teenager in the 90s in Germany.
My best friend would just come over, ask if I'm home, and leave again or go look for me in the common places if I wasn't.
It was awesome, and the loss of that world is something that still hurts.
Lol, when he was 17, my papaw was transporting moonshine for his uncle.
My other grandfather was spending weekends driving over to Harlan to go to the movies.
This was in Pittsburgh, and from what I gather captures the experience of the life of a Jewish teenager in the twenties and thirties pretty well.
Yeah, location is key to that sentence. Jews in the 1930s in Germany had a very.....different experience.
Also, you've probably heard of a "calling card," but these were actual physical things. If you dropped by someone's home or business when they weren't there, you could leave behind a card saying you were there and wanted to get in touch.
Letters weren't only for cross-continental communication.
Before electronic communication you'd send a letter or just show up unannounced.
And you left a "calling card" if you really need/want to talk.
Yes! My grandfather (the movies one from my other comment, not the moonshiner) was still leaving his business cards on people's doors in the 90s when I'd ride around with him trying to collect payments on our customers' accounts.
There's also telegraphs, but I'm not sure if casual friends could use it, I don't think telegraphs ever reached the masses?
You'd send telegrams via telegraph by going to a business that offered the service. The business on the other end would either deliver it, or have the post office do it.
But no, telegraphs weren't something the average person owned.
You could also just pay a neighbor kid a few cents to run the message for you.
Iv done that one! On my walk home in the 8th grade there was this really nice old lady who would flag down random school kids to deliver envelopes all over the place. Would give you 5 bucks to do it!
She would also let you see her tits if she was drunk enough.
Found out years later it was a whore house, but the old lady who ran it was really nice to everyone routinely would let you sit in her patio if it was raining or snowing really hard and warm up. You weren't allowed inside proper for obvious reasons.
And she was always a good one to go to if you needed some extra cash and were willing to work, mowing lawns running letters or going and buying groceries for her.
Never met anyone who disliked her. She also had the only nice property on the street. Everything was always clean and tidy.
Wild to think back how normal everyone just considered it.
If this is about that period of human history where we had long-distance transportation (ie railroads) but didn't yet have mass communication infrastructure that isn't the postal service -- so 1830s to 1860s -- then I think the answer is to just plan to meet the other person at a certain place every month.
To use modern parlance, put a recurring meeting on their calendar.
hop on a donkey, slap its ass, get lost in a forest, get eaten by a bear.
eeeazeeeee....
This mental image just made me chuckle. 🤭
Sending letters via post to friends in the same city wasn’t uncommon—but beyond that, you could leave messages at common locations. Like if you both go to the same shop once a week, you could leave messages for each other with the shopkeeper.
Before landlines?
As in prior to 1876?
Depends on where you lived.
In some places, you’d leave a note with someone you knew the recipient was going to see that day. In some places, note passing was quite an artform, including special paper folding to protect the contents from prying eyes.
In Paris, they had the tubes — the entire city was plumbed with vacuum tubes, and you could write a note or even pack a small object into a capsule with an address, drop it in your local receptacle, and it would zip across town in minutes to the recipient address.
In other places, markings on trees, mirrors, flags, smoke signals and various musical instruments and bells have been used.
In school. We used to plan where we want to go on certain date and time and just meet there. Admittedly this was still a time with a landline and payphones and my part of the world was just getting cellphones but that's for middle to upper class.
I feel like those were the days where you could have true friendships in society, not “having friends to send memes”.
Um, excuse me? You need to get out of your internet bubble. Tons of people still have friends in real life - most of them, actually. If you don't, and you wish you did, then you have an unusual problem and you should start working on solving it asap
Your message might be correct (maybe) but the way you wrote it could not be wronger.
For starters, it's not an unusual problem at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic?wprov=sfla1
Secondly, your whole comment is really aggressive, from "Um, excuse me?" to "you should work on it asap" it's all just attacks as if it's as simple as that.
Go out earlier is a practice that I think it is not done anymore. If I have a meeting at 4pm and I know that it takes me 30 minutes to get there, I go out of my house one hour before. This is for answer your doubt about how would you let know to your friend that you will be late, you weren't able, the best you can do is be preventative.
Imagine you send a letter to a fellow who lives overseas, you expect to see him september the 3rd in a concrete place. I can bet that person would arrive like a month before and wait the right time. (Obviuosly would not wait for you in that very place, that person can stay in a hotel or whatever).
Letters are only for those cross-continental, cross-oceanic relationships.
Letters were commonly written for people in the same city. Some posh neighborhoods in major cities would have hourly mail service.
You'd show up at their house earlier that day to say, I'm going to be at X place at Y time, I hope you can join me?
Just arranging it the last time in person. Mail worked just fine to confirm or cancel a bit before since the same city. If you needed things more quickly, couriers was one way. There were also a lot third spaces and people met out and about more and more often. They might see each other every Sunday at the same church for instance.
Up until I was in uni, even payphones didn't matter most of the time since there's no guarantee both parties are going to be near one and no normal person had a pager. If you were going to a business that had a phone, you could look up their number and call them to put one of your buddies on the line or at least send a message (see the running gag on the Simpsons where Bart calls the bar to ask for someone).
We also just waited a bit and if they didn't show, we went on with our plans.
Before landlines? You know those have been around for over 100 years?
I was explicitly referring to the pre landlines/payphone era. So this is the time before landlines and payphones.
Were streetcars and buses around before the telephone? I'm honesty not sure.
Mom and dad tell me you would go outside and talk to people in your neighborhood. Letter delivery was a couple times day so writing letters was common.
They were certainly around before most people had a telephone.
My mother grew up in a household without a telephone. In a big city. She was born in 1951.
For a very short period.
Phones became a mainstream way of communication in the 1880s.
Public transport, in the form of trains and buses and street cars have become widespread in the early 1800s, mostly around 1830-1850 (e.g. London had railway services but the first underground service opened in 1863).
Mind you, most of these services were connecting small-ish town sections (even London wasn't really a unified city until the 1900s, but a bunch of parishes, boroughs and towns connected by railway), so your "friend living on the other side of town" was usually a 15-30 minute walk away at most. In fact most people, the average people anyway, had friends only in the local community as they've rarely left said community and ventured beyond their immediate vicinity. Those who'd have friends from far away - let it be a city a few dozen to a few hundred miles away or even another country - would be either the upper class (nobility and high earning professions like solicitors), or merchants (also rich). Long distance travel was a luxury most couldn't afford.
It was the industrialisation that allowed for cheaper transport and for towns to grow larger and denser, so the overlap of the availability of public transport, the NEED for such transport to meet friends, and the lack of telecommunications wasn't as widespread as one would think.
My parents lived in a part of the world where they didn't always have phones. Dad lived on a farm, mom lived in town. School together, Church together. After school, Dad would go "help around the house" at mom's. Or vice versa. Once they got old enough, one or the other would go to the city in the family car for shopping, and bring the other with. Go see a movie, grab a bite to eat together.