re-establish lost friendships

Hmmm… I wonder if there’s rules or hints on how to connect better with old friendships. I traded e-mail with a friend from high school last week; we gave our capsule descriptions of what’s happened in the last 25 years to both of us, described a little of who we’d become, and about each of our families. She’d even gave contact info and suggested saying hi if we were ever in her town. It was all nice, and it would be interesting seeing here… but there’s a part of me hesitating at saying “that sounds great, let’s all get together some time” because I’m not sure it’ll ever happen. We’ve got all sorts of friends we’ve been bad about seeing, and I just wasn’t sure I wanted to say “yes, getting together would be fun” unless I was sure we were going to do it.

So would getting together be fun – a chance to get back into touch, share stories of who we’d all become, find new common ground – or would it just be like a high school reunion where we’d have a pleasant time, share stories, and then realize there wasn’t enough in common to keep the contact up?

How much do we need to prioritize how we tend our friendships, and which friendships should we be focusing on over others?

I finally started using Facebook seriously when I found their iPhone application. Now, I’m finding myself checking everyone’s status during the commute. Facebook’s a great way to waste time during the bus ride to work.

It’s also getting me back into contact with friends on the East Coast. Before, e-mail turnaround was just too long; we’d either give a curt reply immediately, or lose the letter in our inbox as we thought about a response.

So Facebook isn’t evil and actually makes my life better. I like that.

I commented a few months back that although I’d gotten in touch with some old friends, sometimes the socializing just didn’t stick, and I felt like I was doing all the work trying to get back in touch.

No more.

One old friend from college dropped me a note and suggested we get together for dinner, and used his birthday as a great excuse to force us both to choose a date to get together. That worked great, and we had a fun time between ourselves and spouses. We’re all hoping we can get together again soon.

Another friend from elementary school who I hadn’t heard from just dropped me a note. I’d kept meaning to contact him, but never quite got around to it. It’s too bad, too, for he used to work a few miles from me, but he’s now between jobs and a good forty miles away.

I’m happy and flattered that they took the time to get back in touch (and that they’re both checking e-mail regularly these days.)

Time for me to share the kindness and explicitly plan to get together with other friends too!

On the “Colma: The Musical” director’s commentary, the writer mentioned a usual complaint he hears about the plot. Now, the movie is about teens who’ve just graduated from high school and are trying to figure out what to do next, and whether to leave their little town (which also happens to be the home of most of San Francisco’s cemetaries). It also goes through the events that strengthen and tear apart their friendships. “Geez, it’s just about a bunch of kids whining about minor things in their life. It’s not like they’re whining about important things.”

“But all those things are important for teenagers; the issues in the movie are all the ones we all dealt with at their age. You lose friends for silly reasons because you haven’t yet got the social skills to get it right.”

The director chimed in “Yeah, but luckily you’ll eventually get those social skills and get those friendships back. That’s what happened to [the writer] and me.”

So how many of my misplaced friendships were caused by me not being good about keeping up the friendships when I was in my twenties, and have I learned my lesson yet?

I went out to dinner with some work-friends last night. At one point, I mentioned how a bunch of people at work suddenly came to chat with me once I’d given notice at the job.

M. wasn’t surprised. She’s got a very close group of friends from college she keeps up with, and even though they’re close, they still find there’s times where they all start to drift apart because life gets in the way, or they get caught in a rut, or whatever. Then something happens; the case she remembers was when a friend called to say her father had died. M. started calling around to the other friends to give them the news and encourage them to give support. Even as they were calling the one friend to express sympathies, they also were calling each other to say “we haven’t seen each other for a while. We ought to get together.”

M.’s much more social than I. If her friends can sometimes have problems keeping up, then I guess it must be normal, and just one of those things we have to occasionally fight against.

I promised myself several months ago that I’d start contacting friends that I’d been losing touch with, and see how they were or try to get together. That’s worked great in some cases; I’ve been talking with people I haven’t seen in years.

Now, getting together with others isn’t going as well. In some cases, they live far enough away that getting together isn’t easy. Either they live far enough that we need to intentionally plan a day to visit, or there’s only some weekends we’re up that way and available to stop by, or sometimes we’re just tired enough that taking the effort to be social just seems like a chore.

I’ve been beating myself up over not working harder in these cases. I know we’d still get along because phone conversations with them are fun. But still, we haven’t worked hard enough to get together.

But then I realized that there’s also been the problem that they haven’t been as fired up either, for whatever reasons. A lunch invitation gets passed on, schedules keep conflicting, or e-mails get responded to slowly. In some cases, it feels like I’m the one taking more effort to arrange events, or to reach out to talk to folks.

So at what point are the friends I’m trying to contact responsible for also trying to get in touch? Should they be offering to have us over for dinner to get in touch, or offering to stop by, or calling first?

Some of this might just be that even if we were friends, the connection’s been broken by time, and there just isn’t enough eagerness on both sides to arrange stuff. It might be that we weren’t actually as good friends as we remember. There’s lots of other possible causes: we’re all stressed and overwhelmed at work and don’t want to socialize on weekends, our messages get buried in the inbox, we have too much going on to schedule something, or we’re just way too shy.

So what responsibility do our friends have to try to keep up the contact, and make some of the effort? Is it our responsibility when we try to re-contact friends to do the work—to be proactive about arranging visits, or sending mail more frequently?

Or is bringing back an interrupted friendship just really hard, and sometimes the friendship will show up again, and sometimes it won’t?

I’m planning a trip to the west of Ireland soon (tagging along with a spouse to a conference) and I realized that Turly, a former coworker and the “morale officer” for our department, didn’t live too far from my destination. I hadn’t heard from him since he’d quit and went off to walk the Pilgrim’s trail to Santiago de Compostela. The diary (and photos) from all those days of hiking were impressive, and even for a son of Ireland, Spain seemed to be just his kind of place.

So I drop him a note, and say “So… want to get together?” No problem… except he’s not in Ireland. He’s currently in Barcelona working.

Looks like Spain cast a spell on him. I haven’t heard the story of how he got there, but by coincidence, we’re planning on being in Barcelona too. Guess I’ll hear how a good lad from Cork ended up in Catalonia.

Travel’s fun, especially when old friends live in cool places I’ve always wanted to visit.

So I gave notice at work a week and a half ago; yesterday I started sending out the “I’m leaving this place” e-mail to various friends elsewhere. Some were nearby, some were on another coast or in another country.

I wasn’t intending it to be a reason to be social, but I’m a bit surprised how many people have responded asking for details, asking how I’m doing, etc. It’s been a nice conversation starter for folks I haven’t been talking with in a while.

It’s definitely an easy way to get in touch. Do some big rite-of-passage – get married, have kids, graduate, quit a job, start a job – and there’s a ready-made reason to send out e-mail without any of the “hmmmm… what do I tell them? Why am I even trying to get back in contact” doubts.

The other amazing thing is something I saw the last time I left a job. After I gave notice and the story started circulating around, suddenly people I’d sort-of-knew were coming up, wishing me luck, socializing. We were all too shy, or too busy, or too focused to be social without the reason of connecting before the exit. It’s happening again; folks I’ve known briefly but haven’t talked with are suddenly showing up, and we’re having long conversations about anything—what we like and don’t like about work, our hobbies, our travel dreams, etc.

Now can we all just figure out how to do this without someone having to quit?