Catching up is a drag

Last October, an old college friend and I exchanged a few quick texts, and I promised to give him a call so we could do a longer catch up.

It’s been nine months and I still haven’t called him.

The thought of carving out a few hours to bring someone up to speed in my life makes me want to climb inside of a couch that’s headed to the landfill. The last time this friend and I had a real conversation was a few years before the pandemic. Since then, I’ve gotten a divorce, made some big career changes, and adopted a daughter (a dog — who rescued whom??). It’s like asking someone to jump into the fifth season of a TV show when they stopped watching after season two: You can do your best to explain all the new characters and plot points, but they may not be able to get past the fact that Bobby Draper has now been recast three times.

My friend Krystle sent me a blog post last month (with an eyeroll): “It’s Not You, It’s the Catch-Up Trap: Why Your Adult Friendships Kind of Suck Now.” The post is not particularly well written or researched, and it kind of makes this out to be a Woman’s Problem where ladies only get together at brunch to update one another on jobs/guys/kids. 

BUT! I have thought about how it can feel like a job to reconnect with old friends, and potentially suck the life out of a conversation.

I found a 2021 blog post on Psychology Today about cutting yourself some slack when it comes to catching up. It was related specifically to how we might have fallen behind or missed things during the pandemic, and how we shouldn’t pressure ourselves to make up for all that lost time. But the points made by the author — social psychologist Camille S. Johnson — felt relevant for how we try to make up for lost shared time with friends. 

I emailed Johnson — Dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Pomona — and asked about relating what she wrote to friendships. Johnson points out that catching up with friends often involves re-establishing whatever connection made you both compatible in the first place. This might be a shared sense of humor or a way of seeing the world, but it could also be situational, such as living in the same neighborhood or attending college together. With the latter group, she says, catching up might require you establish a new basis for connection. 

“Lost shared time happens for a lot of reasons — people move, people grow apart, people graduate,” Johnson says. “Catching up may not be so much about the specifics of life details being shared, but about sharing stories and information that reestablishes the common bond and moves the relationship forward.”

I brought up the blog post that Krystle sent me, about how trying to catch up with people can make our friendships feel exhausting, if not downright boring. 

“It sounds like some version of sitting through a slideshow presentation of someone else's vacation pictures,” Johnson acknowledges, but she adds that creating new shared experiences can help to better establish a reconnection. Having those catch-up conversations during a reunion weekend, Johnson explains, makes conversations feel less forced and allows sharing to emerge naturally.

I can vouch for this: In May, Krystle and a few of our other friends came together in Chicago for a weekend. The catching up was easily baked into the activities (This was when I learned that I apparently love a live brass band??!! Or however we can describe Mucca Pazza). We made some new jokes and updated our little friendship bonds. It was far more natural than staring at someone through FaceTime, hoping desperately that your current self is coming across while you tick off all your little updates (yes, I’m still writing; yeah, the family is great; no, I haven’t talked to whatsherface in years).

Johnson brought up something that I’ve talked to a lot of my “newer” friends about: How we feel some of our older friends struggle to see us as we currently are, versus who we were when we first met or when we were in closer proximity to them. Johnson referenced research on past and present selves by psychologists, including Anne Wilson and Ziva Kunda. The idea being: We can feel close to or far from our current, future, and past selves. Our friends might also be attached to those different selves — even if we aren't.

“One challenge is that people from our past trigger us to be the person they remember,” Johnson says. She relates it to how people have a tendency to fall back into their familial roles when around siblings and parents, and we may feel a similar tension between who we were with old friends and who we are now. 

I have absolutely felt frustrated around older friends to be pulled back into yester-Sarah. There’s nothing wrong with her (mostly)! But it’s like you’re asking me to chop off my hair when I just spent years growing it out. Yet Johnson cautions against acting as though there is no former version of yourself.

“If you just start with who you are now and pretend that the past you never existed, you are also cutting off that person's connection to you,” she says. “Maybe that's also about giving grace — forgiving ourselves for being who we were back then.”

This point is a body-slammer. I’ve spent time grumbling about how old friends want to yank me back to a former version of myself, but I never considered that a stubborn refusal to go there could feel dismissive of the connection we previously had. Whoopsie daisies.

So, I will call my friend soon. I’ll give him the highlights from the last few years, without disregarding whatever memories he still equates with me. I can’t deny the version of me he remembers any more than I can pretend I don’t have a Grateful Dead tattoo from around the time we met. Once we find our footing, I can offer him a chance to know my updated self: A person with more and possibly dumber tattoos.