A friend who forgot your birthday but drove you to the airport at 5 a.m. still did the bigger thing.

Reliability and sentiment are not the same system. A date in a calendar is a memory task, and some people are bad at it, while getting out of bed at four thirty to drive somebody to a terminal is a cost paid in sleep and petrol. One costs nothing and looks like caring. The other costs plenty and does not get a post about it.

Rank the people around you by what they have actually done for you, not by what they remembered to say. Forgive the forgetting if the showing up is there. And if you are the forgetful kind, set the reminders, because the small signals still matter.