Why We Don't Reach Out to Old Friends (and What the Research Says Happens When We Do)

In 2024, two psychologists asked a few hundred people to rate how willing they were to do a list of small, mildly unpleasant things. Talk to a stranger. Pick up litter. Volunteer for a task nobody wanted. Tucked into the list was one more item: send a message to a friend you have lost touch with but still care about.

People rated reaching out to that old friend about as appealing as picking up garbage.

That comparison comes from a series of seven studies by Lara Aknin of Simon Fraser University and Gillian Sandstrom of the University of Sussex, published in Communications Psychology. Across nearly 2,500 participants, the pattern was remarkably stable. More than nine in ten people could immediately name an old friend they missed. When given the friend's contact details, time to write, and a blank message box, fewer than one third actually pressed send. This was true even among people who said they wanted to reconnect and believed the friend would be glad to hear from them.

It is a strange kind of failure. Nobody is stopping us. The message would take ninety seconds. And a separate body of research says the person on the other end is likely to be far happier to receive it than we imagine. So what is going on? The answer, pieced together from psychology, sociology, and network science, turns out to say something uncomfortable about how friendships end and something hopeful about how easily they might restart.

Friendships rarely end. They lapse.

Start with how the old friend became an old friend in the first place. The popular picture of a lost friendship involves a falling out. The data suggest that is the exception.

The clearest evidence comes from a Dutch panel study led by Gerald Mollenhorst, Beate Volker, and Henk Flap, published in Social Networks in 2014. Their team had interviewed roughly a thousand adults across the Netherlands around the year 2000 about the people they confided in and relied on for practical help, then returned to re-interview them seven years later. On the surface, little had changed: the average number of confidants was almost identical. Underneath, the churn was considerable. Many of the specific people named in the first interview were gone from the second, replaced by new names.

The researchers' explanation was not conflict. It was opportunity. The single most important reason a relationship was discontinued was a lack of meeting opportunities. People changed jobs, moved house, stopped going to the club. The setting that had produced the friendship disappeared, and the friendship quietly followed. The same study found that new relationships tended to grow in the contexts where people already had ties, which is the mirror image of the same mechanism.

This matters for how we should think about the stock of lapsed friends most of us carry around. If friendships mostly end through drift rather than rupture, then the old friend is usually not someone who chose to leave. They are someone the structure of daily life stopped delivering. The gap between you is a scheduling accident, not a verdict. Our earlier piece on the science of friendship formation covers why proximity and repeated, unplanned contact matter so much for starting friendships. The Dutch study shows the same forces work in reverse when that contact stops.

The recipient's side: appreciated more than we think

If drift is the cause, why not simply reverse it? Part of the answer is that people badly misjudge how the message will land.

Peggy Liu of the University of Pittsburgh, together with SoYon Rim, Lauren Min, and Kate Min, tested this directly in a paper titled The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2023. The work involved 13 preregistered experiments and roughly 6,000 participants. Some studies were scenario-based. Others were field experiments in which university students wrote a short check-in message, or sent a small gift such as coffee or cookies, to someone in their social circle they had not spoken with in a while. The senders predicted how much the recipient would appreciate it. The researchers then contacted the recipients and asked.

Across nearly every version of the experiment, senders underestimated how much their gesture was appreciated. The effect held for a brief text and for a physical gift alike.

The explanation the authors settled on is elegant. Recipients are focused on something the sender is not: surprise. Being reached out to unexpectedly feels good partly because it is unexpected, and that surprise feeds appreciation. The sender, who has been planning the message, experiences no surprise at all and so fails to price it in. Consistent with this, the underestimation grew larger when the contact was more surprising, and, in the finding most relevant here, when the two people were more socially distant. In other words, the further a friend has drifted, the more we underestimate how glad they will be to hear from us.

A note on how sturdy this is. One of the paper's scenario studies has since been independently replicated by a third-party group with a larger sample of 742 people. The effect reappeared, though it was modest, with a Cohen's d of roughly 0.25, which is a small effect by conventional standards. The gap between prediction and reality is real. It is not enormous. But it points consistently in one direction, and that direction is: send the message.

Why an old friend starts to feel like a stranger

Aknin and Sandstrom's seven studies were, in part, an attempt to find out why the appreciation gap is not enough to overcome our hesitation. Their first studies simply asked people what held them back. The common answers were fear the friend would not want to hear from them, worry about awkwardness, and guilt about having let things slide. Being too busy came last.

Then the researchers tried something more revealing. In one study of 288 people they placed "message an old friend" on the same scale as "talk to a stranger" and found, as described above, that participants were no more willing to do the first than the second. In the next study, with 319 participants, they asked people to rate how much a particular old friend now felt like a stranger. The more stranger-like the friend felt, the less willing people were to reach out.

The authors put it plainly in a later essay for Scientific American:

"The passage of time makes old friends feel like strangers."

This connects the reconnection problem to something YaraLoop has written about before. The barriers people describe when contemplating a message to a lapsed friend are almost word for word the barriers commuters describe when contemplating a conversation with the person next to them. As we explored in our piece on weak ties, Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder found that people expect a stranger to rebuff them and are consistently wrong. Aknin and Sandstrom's data suggest that an old friend, once enough silence has accumulated, is mentally re-filed into that same "stranger" category, and inherits all its imagined risk.

That reclassification is the heart of the problem, and it is worth pausing on how odd it is. Nothing about the friend has necessarily changed. What has changed is the amount of unshared time between you, and the mind treats unshared time as unfamiliarity.

The paradox: the silence that scares us is what makes reconnection valuable

Here is where a finding from a very different field turns the story around.

In 2011, Daniel Levin of Rutgers, Jorge Walter of George Washington University, and J. Keith Murnighan of Northwestern published a paper in Organization Science called Dormant Ties: The Value of Reconnecting. The social-networks literature had long assumed that ties must be maintained to keep their value: a relationship left untended decays into nothing useful. Levin and colleagues tested that assumption by asking hundreds of executives enrolled in MBA programs to reconnect with contacts they had not spoken to in at least three years and consult them about a real work project. The executives then rated the advice against what they got from their current contacts.

The dormant ties did not underperform. The advice from people the executives had not spoken with in years was as useful, and often more useful, than the advice from active relationships. The reason maps neatly onto the sociology of weak and strong ties. A current close contact offers trust and a shared perspective but tends to know what you already know. A stranger offers novelty but no trust. A dormant tie, the researchers argued, offers both at once: the trust laid down when the relationship was active has not evaporated, while the years apart have filled the other person with new experiences, new contacts, and new information you have not heard.

Set this next to the psychology and a paradox appears. The accumulated unshared time is exactly what makes the old friend feel like a stranger and stops us writing. It is also exactly what makes them worth writing to. The novelty we fear is the novelty we would benefit from. The trust we assume has lapsed is the part that, according to the dormant-ties work, tends to persist.

One caution is needed. Levin's study measured the usefulness of work advice among executives, not emotional closeness among friends. It would be a stretch to claim it proves that rekindled friendships are richer than current ones. What it does establish is narrower and still striking: silence does not seem to erode the foundation of a relationship nearly as fast as we assume it does.

What actually gets people to press send

Aknin and Sandstrom did not stop at diagnosis. Their seventh study tested ways of getting people over the line, and the results are instructive because the obvious approach failed.

Interventions aimed at changing attitudes did nothing measurable. Telling people not to overthink it, or addressing their specific worries about awkwardness and rejection, left the sending rate flat. What worked was borrowed from the stranger-conversation research: a behavioural warm-up. Participants were first asked to send a few messages to current friends, people they were already comfortable with, and only then to draft a message to the lapsed one. In the control condition, 31 percent of participants messaged their old friend. In the warm-up condition, 53 percent did. The researchers described this as increasing reach-outs by about two-thirds.

Sandstrom's summary of the mechanism is worth quoting:

"When people were given time to practice in a situation that felt more comfortable, namely by sending messages to current friends, they were much more likely to make the leap to messaging someone they had lost touch with."

The lesson is not that persuasion is useless. It is that the barrier appears to be less a belief and more a kind of social stiffness, and stiffness responds to movement rather than argument.

Two follow-up studies from Aknin's lab sharpen this picture, and both are recent. In a 2025 paper in Collabra: Psychology, Kristina Castaneto and Aknin coded 863 draft messages to old friends along more than twenty dimensions, looking for the features of a note that predicted whether its author actually sent it. They found almost nothing consistent. Length, warmth, positivity: none reliably separated sent notes from abandoned ones. In a separate survey of 312 people, the author's personality and general happiness did little to predict reaching out either. The one detail that did stand out, in their coding work, was that notes containing an apology or an expression of regret were less likely to be sent. The more the writer dwelt on the lapse itself, the more likely the note died in the drafts folder.

Then in January 2026, Janaki Patel, Castaneto, and Aknin published a study in Motivation and Emotion with a counterintuitive title: Can saying "thanks" hinder social contact? Gratitude has a strong track record in relationship research, so they tested whether nudging people to include an expression of thanks in their message would make reconnection more likely. First they noticed that, among 194 spontaneously written notes, only a single one contained a clear statement of gratitude. Then, in a preregistered experiment with 424 participants, they randomly assigned half to receive a suggestion to include gratitude in their note. The suggestion undermined reconnection: people nudged toward gratitude were less likely to follow through.

Read together, the three papers point at the same conclusion from different angles. The content of the message barely matters, and efforts to improve it, whether by apologising or by expressing thanks, tend to make it heavier rather than better. The thing that predicts reconnection is not what you write. It is whether you have loosened up enough to write at all.

What the evidence does not tell us

A fair reading requires marking the edges.

• The samples are narrow. Much of this work relies on undergraduates and online panels in North America. Aknin and Sandstrom's participants were largely Canadian students and adults recruited online. Whether the stranger-like drift of old friends looks the same in cultures with denser kin networks or different norms around obligation is an open question.
• Sending is not the same as reconnecting. The primary outcome in most of these studies is whether a message was sent, not whether a friendship was rebuilt. Liu's work shows recipients appreciate the first message. It does not follow that every reconnection develops into a lasting relationship, and no one has yet tracked these pairs over years.
• The effects are modest. The appreciation gap replicated at a small effect size. The warm-up intervention moved sending from roughly a third to roughly half, which is meaningful, but half of people still did not write.
• The dormant-ties evidence is about work, not intimacy. Executives seeking project advice are not the same as friends seeking each other. The finding that trust persists through silence is suggestive, not settled, when applied to friendship.
• Some friendships lapsed for good reasons. None of these studies asked people to reconnect with someone who had hurt them. The findings describe the ordinary case of drift, not the case of a relationship that ended because it should have.

Putting it together

Taken as a whole, the research describes a specific and fixable trap. Friendships mostly fade through lost opportunity rather than lost affection. The silence that follows gets misread by the mind as unfamiliarity, so a person who once knew you well is refiled alongside strangers. From that category they inherit an imagined risk of rejection that the data on recipients say is largely fictional. And the more distant the friend has become, the wider the gap between how we expect the message to land and how it actually does.

The practical implications are almost embarrassingly simple, and they cut against instinct. Do not wait for the perfect message; the content does not predict whether it gets sent, and polishing it with apologies or gratitude seems to make sending less likely. Do not try to talk yourself into it; attitude interventions failed. Instead, warm up. Message two people you are already in touch with, then open the conversation you have been avoiding. In the one controlled test of that approach, it moved the needle more than anything else tried.

There is a broader point here about how connection works. Much of the conversation about loneliness focuses on making new friends, which is slow, effortful, and uncertain. Yet nearly everyone is walking around with a reserve of relationships that already exist, already contain trust, and are waiting on a ninety-second message. Some newer platforms are being built with this in mind, treating the lowering of social friction, the warm-up before the leap, as a design problem rather than a matter of willpower. YaraCircle is one attempt in that direction. The underlying insight, though, belongs to the researchers: the old friend who feels like a stranger is not one, and the evidence says they would be glad you wrote.