Reconnecting with Lost Friends
By Sarah Bird
Thanks to the Internet, Americans are reconnecting in record numbers. There
are huge rewards — but also unexpected risks
Every time I dig through my jewelry box, I stumble across the
necklace a close college friend gave me over 30 years ago: a perfect rectangle
of iridescent lapis lazuli butterfly wing preserved beneath a small dome of
glass, dangling on a silver chain. The exquisite antique haunts me for two
reasons: because it had originally been a present to my friend, Darcy Lowell,
from her grandmother, and because my friendship with Darcy came to an uneasy,
unresolved end. So when Good Housekeeping asked me to investigate the
burgeoning trend of reconnecting online by tracking down a dropped connection
or two of my own, I took it as a sign.
Darcy and I had been opposites who attracted. As an almost six-foot-tall outsider from a nomadic military family, I found her petite blonde all-American beauty, cheerleader vivacity, and privileged small-town background irresistibly exotic. Darcy, in turn, was fascinated by my rootless childhood. With the butterfly-wing necklace, she symbolically gave me the claustrophobic security she was trying to escape.
I gave Darcy wings of a different sort. In 1971, during our junior year, we abandoned college to hitchhike and Eurail in Europe and its environs — a trip that intensified our friendship and then destroyed it. Bound by a shared language and hours spent in cramped train compartments, we had only each other. In that isolation, small slights gradually metastasized into unforgivable offenses. Barely 20, I grew weary of always being the grown-up; she seemed weary of me. After a tense ride from Marrakech, Morocco, to Algeciras, Spain, we parted ways, with no explanation and no plans to meet again on that or any other continent.
But all these years later, besides returning the necklace, I wanted to understand why our friendship fell apart, to tell her my side of the story, and to hear hers. I wanted to know what'd happened to her since. And I wanted to see her for the reason I think we all want to reconnect with people from our past: She'd been part of my life, and, for better or worse, she helped make me who I am now.
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Reconnecting has never been more popular, largely because it's never been easier. Over the past few years, social networking has grown dramatically, with 127 million Americans now visiting these Websites each month, according to Sarah Radwanick, marketing-communications analyst at ComScore, Inc., a global Internet information provider. Many networks, like Facebook and Friendster, allow you to make new friends, but "they're set up to facilitate reconnection, too," says Chris Brogan, vice president of strategy and technology at CrossTech Media, which tracks technology trends. Specialized sites like classmates.com and reunion.com, which together claim about 75 million registered members, focus on reunions. And ordinary search engines let us find in minutes information that once took weeks of letter-writing and long-distance calling, or hiring a detective to uncover.
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