Renewing friendships is easy. What holds us back?

Write it or don’t? The psychology of hitting “send”

Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada set out to learn what makes us willing to reach out to someone we’ve lost touch with. Earlier studies found that 90 percent of people have an “old friend” they still feel warmly about but no longer contact. What’s more, although most would like to reconnect, only about 30 percent actually do. Why do so few of us move from intention to action?

To find out, the team analysed 850+ messages participants drafted to former friends. Crucially, everyone had the option to send their message — but no one was forced to. The texts were examined on 20 criteria: length, expressed emotions, references to past/present/future, even whether the authors took responsibility for letting the friendship fade.

Renewing friendships: who actually decides to do it?

The results were surprising. “We used statistical regression analyses to examine links between message features and the behaviour of making contact — only six were statistically significant,” the authors write in Collabra: Psychology. Translation: content isn’t the key factor predicting whether someone actually sends the message.

So if the wording doesn’t matter much, what does? The researchers shifted focus to the people themselves. They recruited 312 participants and asked about happiness, loneliness, personality traits, and beliefs about friendship. After participants drafted a note to a former friend, the team asked whether they had actually sent it.

As in prior work, only 34.2 percent decided to send their message. But this time a unifying trait emerged: a belief that friendships can survive long gaps without contact. The researchers called it “friendship resilience.”

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The real blocker is in our heads

This study offers a clear lesson. It’s not a lack of perfect words that stops us from reconnecting. The problem lives in our assumptions — the fear that a reach-out is doomed to fail. If we believed friendship was more resilient than it seems, we’d hit send far more often.

So next time you think of an old friend, just write. Don’t overanalyze, don’t search for the perfect reason, don’t stress about length or jokes. Type: “Hey — it’s been a while. How are you?” If you don’t try, how will you ever learn whether renewing friendships is easier than you thought?

Read this article in Polish: Nie trzeba wiele, by odnowić starą przyjaźń. Co nas blokuje?