The number is still there. Maybe there’s also the chat, buried under years of WhatsApp groups, automatic greetings and forgotten conversations. It would be enough to write “Hi, how are you?”. Yet the message remains in the head, while the phone remains on the table. Reconnecting with an old friend can make us almost as uncomfortable as speaking to a stranger.
This is shown by a series of seven studies published in 2024 on Communications Psychology by Lara Aknin, Simon Fraser University, and Gillian Sandstrom, University of Sussex. Overall they involved more than 2,400 people and started from a very common situation: having someone we loved, having lost sight of them and still continuing to think that it would be nice to hear from them again. When you move from intention to finger on the keyboard, however, something happens.
The old friend begins to resemble a stranger
In two of the experiments the researchers made the task almost ridiculously easy. They selected people who already wanted to reconnect, had their friend’s contact information available and thought the friend would be happy to hear from them. Then they gave them time to prepare and send a message. Fewer than one in three people did so.
Among the fears that emerged were the fear of disturbing, the fear of discovering that the other person was not interested and the embarrassment of having to fill years of silence with a first sentence. That old schoolmate with whom you once spoke for hours may still be familiar in your memory and, at the same time, have become almost a stranger in your daily life.
The research tried to measure precisely this passage. In a study with 288 participants, willingness to contact an old friend was similar to that shown toward some unappealing activities, including starting a conversation with a stranger. In another experiment, the more the old friend was perceived as distant and unfamiliar, the less the desire to write to him was.
In short, time can do a rather bizarre thing: leave our affection intact and take away the confidence needed to use it.
Whoever receives that message may appreciate it more than we imagine
Then there is a forecast error that complicates things further. In 2023 Peggy Liu, SoYon Rim, Lauren Min and Kate Min posted on the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology a series of 13 experiments with over 5,900 participants.
The result was repeated in different contexts: those who decided to contact someone again tended to underestimate how much the gesture would be appreciated by those who received it. It happened with a simple message and even when a small gift was added to the contact.
Part of the difference seems to be related to surprise. The person sending the message thinks above all about their own gesture and the possible embarrassing consequences. The recipient instead finds himself in front of a person who, after months or years, has remembered him. And that surprise weighs on the positive evaluation of the contact.
The effect was even greater when the message came from more socially distant relationships. Just when we think writing might seem strange, then, we may be particularly poor at predicting the other person’s reaction. Knowing all this, however, is not necessarily enough to make us press “Send”.
To unblock it, it worked best to send another message first
Aknin and Sandstrom tried different ways to get participants to contact someone again. Explaining the possible benefits, changing the way the decision was presented or reassuring them about the consequences produced modest results. Then they changed their approach.
A group of participants were asked to spend three minutes first writing to friends and acquaintances with whom they were already normally in contact. A kind of social warming. Only later did I get the chance to write to my old friend.
In the control group, about a third of people did so. After the brief “warm-up”, the share rose to around half: a relative increase of around two-thirds. The authors hypothesize that performing an easy social gesture first made the subsequent one less enormous. It’s an almost irritating solution for its simplicity. No great analysis of one’s adolescence, no perfect message to file away for forty-five minutes. First we write to someone we are already comfortable with. Then, perhaps, that chat that has been stopped since 2019 opens.
Research published in Collaborate: Psychology added another detail. By analyzing 863 messages prepared for old friends and then studying personality, friendship satisfaction and other individual characteristics, the researchers found little to predict who would actually send the message. Not even the most obvious personality traits offered a robust explanation. Hesitation therefore seems much less a matter for “shy people” than one might think.
These studies talk about faded friendships, not relationships that have hurt us
However, there is an important boundary. In several experiments, participants had to think of someone with whom they had lost contact for no particular reason, who they would like to hear from again and who they believed would be willing to accept the message.
These are very different conditions from a friendship that ended in betrayal, a long series of conflicts, aggressive behavior, or a relationship from which someone has consciously chosen to walk away. The results do not mean that reopening any door is a good idea, nor that the same person who left us ten years earlier necessarily awaits us on the other side.
Study samples are also primarily concentrated across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and include university and online participants. They are experiments in social behavior, not a universal law on middle school reunions.
However, they say something very concrete about friendships that are simply faded by time. We can want to get them back, believe that the other would be happy and already have their number before our eyes. And still keep putting it off. Sometimes between two people who have lost touch there are no old wounds to reopen. There are three dots that never appeared on the screen. It’s a very banal sentence that neither of them has yet decided to write.
