How closeness and health work together

Grenier reads every relationship along three dimensions. Closeness is the level you put someone in — Garden, Orchard, or Cornfield — and it answers “how close is this person to me?”. Health answers “am I keeping up with them?” with one distinction: at the rhythm you set, or past it. Interests are the topics you’ve noted or that surface from your history, and they answer “what is there to talk about?”. This article is about how the first two combine.

Closeness sets the keep-in-touch interval: Garden is your closest people at about 90 days, Orchard is regular contact at about 180 days, and Cornfield is occasional but real at about 365 days. Those intervals are fixed: they come with the level, and there is no setting that changes them. When a rhythm doesn’t fit someone, move them to the level that does.

Health is scored relative to that cadence rather than on a fixed calendar. The same 180-day silence reads very differently depending on the closeness level: it pushes a Garden contact past their rhythm — you’re overdue against a 90-day target — but leaves a Cornfield contact comfortably tended, since that is well inside a 365-day target. So health always means “relative to the rhythm this contact’s closeness level sets.”

Reading the two together tells you whether to act or to leave well alone. Tended means “no action needed” at every closeness level. Waiting never does: it already means you are past the interval that comes with that person’s level, so the slower cadence has been taken into account before the reading is made. What varies is how much it asks of you — reconnect priority rises with closeness, so a Garden contact past their rhythm is your single most urgent reconnect, a Orchard contact past their rhythm is worth a note when you have a moment, and a Cornfield contact past their rhythm has gone more than 365 days without a word. That last one is not a relationship sitting at its natural rhythm; it is one you kept rather than archived and then didn’t speak to for longer than that. Reach out, or archive them — both are honest answers, and Grenier would rather you pick one than drift.

When your rate has room to spare, Rounds can suggest a few people worth bringing in or moving closer: people you really write back and forth with, whose rhythm fits a closer level than the one they are on, or who aren’t on your list at all. The strongest case comes first, whether or not they are already on your list. Grenier looks only when you ask — it reads your recent mail with a few of them and sets aside paid services, recruiters and one-off requests — and nobody moves until you say yes.

The matrix below shows every combination of the three closeness levels and the two health readings, with what each cell means and the nudge it implies.