Re-connecting with Old Friends

[fawn001]

When I become friends with someone, I am friends for life. I dont have to keep in contact with them. But once I know you, then I will always want to know about you. I want to know what happened to you, what you are doing, where you live etc.

I have found that co-workers have no interest in keeping in contact with me. I want to keep in contact with them but they dont. The same is true for Facebook. Old friends dont have any interest in connecting again with me. But I want to know about them. These are not friendships that were negative or ended badly. Just people I knew at one time. Its like they dont want to put any effort into re-connecting because there is nothing in it for them.

Why are people like this? Why dont they want to keep in touch? It hurts my feelings because I care about what they are doing but they dont seem to care about what I am doing.

 

[Jaffas]

I'm just like you, I am a friend for life. However before Facebook I sucked at keeping in contact with people but if I saw them again I could just pick up from where we left off. Add to that the fact that I have lived in many different places and had many circles of friends and Facebook seemed like the ideal place for all my various worlds to come toghether. Well, like you I've had my fair share of disappointments, people that tracked me down (I have an extremely unique name so I'm easy to find) only to never respond to my personal messages or comment on my newsfeed posts. People that I tracked down, people I considered some of the most important friends of my life, that after a few "so what are you up to now?" exchanges never acknowledged me again. On the other hand I have reconnected with a friend that had been looking for me for years, I had never realized what an important friend I had been to her. We became friends when she was kicking a heroin habit and apparently my friendship was one of the things that helped her. Now she is one of the closest and most cherished friends I have reconnected with. She lives in Italy so Facebook is ideal for communicating with her. Plus I have made new friends, or discovered I had a lot in common with some people I barely knew - like ex-coworkers - that makes up for the old friends that don't seem to be interested in me any more. I know in my case my inability to keep in touch with people may have hurt them. In some cases I basically disappeared. I can be very impulsive and have done things like move from Italy to Arizona at the drop of a hat. Maybe the people we lost contact with were hurt by what we perceived as drifting apart or maybe they just aren't interested in what we're doing now. Whatever the case, I'm grateful for the handful good friends I have found online both old and new.