Missing a friend from the past? You should reach out.

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When Joanna Li was 10 years old, her life was upended as her family moved from Guangzhou, China, to Vancouver, Canada. A shy girl with imperfect English, Li quickly bonded with Aoi, another Asian girl in her class who had recently moved from Japan. Li and Aoi were basically inseparable. “She was the very first friend I ever made, she was my only friend,” says Li. They did playground gymnastics on the monkey bars, played catch (Aoi was a big baseball fan), and bonded over their love of Sanrio characters. They saw each other almost every day. But after only a year together, Li’s family moved to Toronto, and the two never saw each other again.

“I think back on it as such a good time in an otherwise really difficult year,” says Li, now a 28- year-old research assistant in Montreal. She still thinks about Aoi from time to time and wonders what happened to her. She sometimes thinks about getting in touch, and has even gone so far to cursorily look her up on social media. But something stops her from making an earnest effort to reconnect.

“I don’t really know who she is now, where she is, or what she’s like as a person,” Li says. The prospect of reaching out but failing to recapture their old camaraderie, or to connect only for the relationship to stagnate is enough of a deterrent for Li, who worries that a disappointing outcome will leave a sad tinge on her warm childhood memories.

Li is hardly alone in her fears about reconnection. While most people report having an old friend they care about but have lost touch with, shockingly few are actually willing to reach out, says Lara Aknin, a professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University in Canada. It’s a common conundrum for many, especially in the midst of a so-called “loneliness epidemic,” in which many of our social connections seem to be fraying.

Aknin and her research partner, Gillian Sandstrom, recently published new research composed of a series of surveys and experiments across more than a thousand participants, all aimed at better understanding why it’s so hard to reach out to old friends, and what we can do to encourage the act of reconnection.

“People are not averse to the idea of reconnection in general, but mainly about the idea of having to be the one to initiate it,” says Aknin. Study participants mentioned that they feared being an intrusion; feeling like their overture might be inappropriate or awkward; and worrying that their old friend will think it’s weird that they’re getting in touch. This resistance is surprisingly hard to get over, even in the smoothest of circumstances.

Aknin and Sandstrom tinkered with their study set-ups to make it as easy as possible for people to take the leap and make contact. In one setting, they asked participants to pick an old friend they cared about and would like to get in touch with — specifying that this must be a friend whose contact information they already had and who they did not have a falling out with. The team gave each person three minutes to draft an introductory message to that friend. Next, participants were given a moment of pause and invited to actually send that message out. “Regardless of what we did, it didn’t seem to matter,” says Aknin. Across the board, in the easiest of circumstances, most people didn’t want to reach out. Less than a third of participants were willing to send an old friend their digital message. “We were a little dumbfounded,” says Aknin. “I thought we were going to be at 70 or 80 percent. We thought this was low-hanging fruit.”

Interestingly, when other participants were asked to estimate how many people would send their messages, they guessed that just over half would. Maybe that’s why we don’t reach out, says Aknin, because we expect other people to do it.

Aknin and Sandstrom’s research also suggests that people struggle to find adequate justification for getting back in touch with someone. Survey participants cited “being in a friend’s neighborhood,” “wanting to share a meme,” “saying that they were thinking about them,” and “wanting to share a memory” as not good enough reasons to get back in touch with an old friend.

Of course, there are a number of very valid reasons to not reconnect. Yasmina K., 32, who asked not to use her last name for privacy, says that she lost touch with a lot of friends during her college years. She felt really lost during that time, and needed to get to a place where she felt more secure in who she was before she could start rekindling those old relationships. Once she got to that point, she started remembering the friends from her past who she valued and missed — it made natural sense to try to get back in touch.

Aknin’s research also suggests that “the more an old friend feels like a stranger, the less likely people are willing to reach out to them.” This certainly was the case for Hema Rao. By the time Facebook came around in the mid-2000s, Rao, 53, was living in Pennsylvania and hadn’t seen her college or high school friends from India in well over a decade. She found a few of them easily on social media, but hesitated to reach out. “I gave it a lot of thought for some time,” she says. So much of their lives was unknown to her — where they lived, what they were doing — it felt almost inappropriate to intrude on their lives, she says.

Both Yasmina and Rao ended up reconnecting with their friends, despite their initial apprehensions, and both led to fruitful, reignited relationships. In the last year or so, Yasmina met several friends from grade school through reunions, getting mutual friends to arrange hangouts, and serendipitously running into them in real life. In every instance, Yasmina has reminded herself that you really will never know unless you try. “Whatever is meant to come from it will come from it,” she says, “but only if you just make the move and do it.” Though she felt so many doubts before reaching out, Rao has, too, felt so much joy in her reconnections. They’ve taught her that being the initiator is a low-risk, high-reward proposition. “At the most, they’re going to say no, or ignore you, and that’s not the end of the world,” Rao says.

Interestingly, Aknin and Sandstrom found that the people who sent off their messages to old friends reported feeling happier than the people who did not. “We can’t say for certain that it made people happier, because happier people may have been more likely to send their messages in the first place,” says Aknin. But it’s not a totally implausible idea.

A large body of research also shows that people consistently underestimate the value of different social interactions. Researchers know that we tend to underestimate how much people enjoy talking to us, the impressions our conversations have on others, and people’s interest in making new connections. Past research has also shown that people tend to be happier to hear from us than we expect. As the authors of one 2022 paper put it: “undersociality is unwise.”

Research on networking and “dormant ties”— broadly defined as work-related connections that subjectively feel like they’re no longer active, where you’re no longer in touch — could also provide insights to the benefits of reconnecting with old friends. This research about professional contacts shows that there are different benefits to meeting up with someone you’re already close to, compared with a new acquaintance, says Daniel Levin, a professor at Rutgers University who researches professional networking.

When you meet with someone you are already connected to, that interaction benefits you by building on an established sense of trust and closeness. Connecting with a new acquaintance, on the other hand, brings the advantage of introducing novelty into your world. One paper co-authored by Levin found that when you reconnect with someone you’ve lost touch with, you “double dip,” he says. That connection reawakens a dormant tie, and the result is that you see both a building sense of trust and closeness and the novelty each person brings after so much time apart.

So how can we muster up the willpower to get over our fears and press send? You might just need a little bit of practice.

In their new research, Aknin and Sandstrom also crafted an intervention that they hoped would get people more comfortable with the idea of reaching out. To test it out, they gave participants three minutes to write and send messages to current friends and family. Another group of participants were given three minutes to scroll on social media. After that time passed, all participants were encouraged to spend the next couple minutes sending a message to an old friend they haven’t been in touch with for a while. The people who had spent their three minutes sending messages to family and friends were about 70 percent more likely than their social media scrolling counterparts to message their old friends in that time.

Aknin isn’t quite sure why this worked, but other existing research suggests that the more people practice socializing, the more trust they gain in their own abilities. People are also more likely to reach out to others when they learn that social skills are indeed skills that can be learned and improved on, says Levin. “If you’re of the mindset that some people are just born great networkers, then you’re less likely to reach out to other people,” he says.

Aknin has access to all the messages people wrote in preparation for contacting an old friend, whether those messages were sent or not. Notably, early analyses show that those who wrote messages with a vague mention of future plans, like “we should hang out sometime” or “let’s get coffee?” had a higher likelihood of actually sending their notes.

New friends are wonderful, says Rao, but it can be hard to feel like they properly understand where you’re coming from when they don’t have access to your history. With old friends, especially ones who you grew up with, “you seem to relate to the same situation,” she says. And she’s grateful to be able to think back on those times together. “It’s hard to put in words … it’s such a pleasure.”

And that is, in part, what Li is seeking as well. Aoi was “the only one who really shared that part of my life with me,” she says. “It’d be nice to reminisce with someone and be like, hey, remember when we were 10 and we didn’t know English and were new to the country? Did you feel the same way I did?”