Telling a friend “I miss you” isn’t needy. It’s brave.

Saying it out loud puts you first on the record. You are admitting that the friendship means more to you than you can be certain it means to them, with no guarantee of a matching sentence back. That exposure is the reason it feels like weakness, when it is actually the opposite. People who can only wait to be missed end up in friendships where nobody ever starts anything.

Send it to one person this week, plainly, with no joke attached to soften it. If a reply takes a while, let it. The point was not getting a particular answer; the point was that they now know.