The one that got away

People come and go in our lives, but if there’s a friendship you regret losing, could it be time to reconnect?

Do you ever find yourself lying in bed at night thinking or dreaming of an old friend? Perhaps it’s someone you fell out with many years ago, or maybe you just slipped out of contact for no particular reason. Time passes, lives change, but in the quiet of the night you might look back fondly and regret the loss of the closeness you once shared.

As you read this feature, notice the names from your past that pop into your head. Jot them down, along with any thoughts, memories, hopes or fears about reconnecting. Just note anything and everything that comes to mind without censoring yourself. We’ll return to this journalling exercise later.

A tale of healing

Judging from the stories I heard when I asked people’s experiences of friendship breakdowns, it’s common for friends to drift apart or even disappear from each other’s lives, but it’s also not so rare to reconnect.

Daphne Walsh*, a counsellor from San Francisco in the US, had a great friend she made while studying abroad in Paris. ‘We had a deep connection and had lots of bonding experiences,’ she says. ‘We scheduled a snowboarding trip in 2003, during which we went snowmobiling. She was driving, with me on the back, and at one point she made a reckless move and accidentally flipped us over. I landed on my ankle and fractured it. This ruined the rest of our trip and I had to fly home. After that, she didn’t handle it well – she didn’t know how to apologise, and instead brushed it off and would tell me about other snowboarding trips she was doing, which felt really cruel.