Both of us have 25th college reunions fast approaching. And as we write this, neither of us has registered. The emotions that these events tend to inspire – most notably shame, dread and regret – loom so large in our psyches that we spent the pandemic co-writing a novel that hinges on reunion-phobia.
Apparently we’re not the only ones. A friend of ours, Rebecca, hasn’t mustered the courage to RSVP to her 20-year-college reunion in June. “I am terrified,” she said. “I both really want to go and I really don’t want to go.”
A member of Lauren’s book-club WhatsApp chat had a similar reaction last month. “I have my reunion in May and I am already panicking.”
Meanwhile, Rachel finds herself in a group text (titled “On That Reunion Deal”) with old friends debating the pros and cons of going. “It’s more of an opportunity to be with YOU GUYS who I don’t see nearly enough,” wrote one of her college friends. “I do not need to be in the beer tent or whatever,” she said in typical Gen-X fashion.
Why do reunions inspire such anxiety? Could it be that the films of our youth have primed us to melt down at the prospect of a weekend-long show-and-tell game centered on how we’ve been spending our precious and once-promising lives?
“What am I going to say? ‘I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork’?” asks the postgrad assassin played by John Cusack in the 1997 dark-comedy movie Grosse Pointe Blank, as he contemplates attending his own 10-year high school reunion. In Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, made the same year, the ditzy protagonists (played by Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino) are such losers that they roll up to the event in a borrowed Jaguar and bearing an absurdly fabricated story: they invented the Post-it note. In 1983’s The Big Chill, the occasion for a reunion of far-flung college friends is the death of the most winning member of their clique by suicide. Fun times indeed.
Another part of the stress engulfing the decision process centers around the wild unpredictability of how it’s all going to go. It could be amazing, but it could also be a disaster. For Rebecca who now works at a branding firm, running into the people who lent an element of delight to her undergraduate years might be “fleeting and gorgeous,” she said. But there also may be some painfully awkward encounters with ex-friends, and flat-out insufferable ones with people who will brag about their families, their savvy real-estate investments and their well-reviewed album releases. “There are so many ways to feel less-than,” she said.
To avoid such situations, some people have devised a way to go and not go at the same time. The reunion version of having one’s cake and eating it too involves driving up on reunion weekend with close friends and loitering in the margins yet eschewing all official events.
Lauren dipped a toe into these noncommittal reunion waters when she showed up last year as the date to her (one year older!) college best friend’s 25th reunion. Lauren made a cameo at the Saturday night mixer, but left early (to watch a movie one of the reunion attendees had made) in her hotel room. Upon learning that only 0.5% of the class of 99 – 182 people – had registered six weeks out, one of Rachel’s friends texted: “Well, at least we can enjoy each others’ company without having to run into randos and recount our resumés. #0.5%”
And really, what is the point of going to all the official activities? Nowadays, thanks to the blessing (and curse) of social media, we already have a pretty good sense of what everyone else is doing – who got divorced, who conquered which industry, who’s on Ozempic. There is no pressing need to play catch-up with acquaintances and embellish our own narratives because everyone already knows – or suspects – the truth. Plus, if we want to contact anyone from the past, they are just a DM away.
Yet, as the early-bird registration dates are on the cusp of expiration and we neurotically mull our options, another idea becomes increasingly inescapable: what if the fact that we already know what everyone’s up to is the reason why we absolutely must go to our reunions?
Call it wishful thinking or radical acceptance or whatever you like, but as we deliberate our reunion plans, we can’t ignore the fact that the main reason they trigger discomfort is that they are among the last truly analog events in a digital world. The more we talk about this, the more obvious it becomes that there could be something liberating about each of us strolling into the official reunion tent, interacting IRL with people we knew back when a social network had nothing to do with computers and when filters were for coffee machines, not photographs. In a sense, if we put our phones down, these beer tents might serve as magic portals to our past selves.
There is something wonderful – and yes, a bit frightening – about facing up to the prior versions of ourselves, the young women who still ran on hopes and dreams. Before she took the newspaper job that set her on a career path in the ever-consolidating media world, Lauren was a film studies major and college radio DJ with a flip phone and the spitfire energy to spend her evenings attending movies and concerts (mostly, and giddily, alone). Rachel, meanwhile, was a pre-med biology major who began to realize senior year that she enjoyed her creative writing electives more than organic chemistry. Liberated by her decision not to pursue medical school, and with all of her biology requirements under her belt, she spent senior year devouring books of poetry and going to as many live music events as possible.
College is a time of change and transition, a moment to figure out who we are and what we really want out of life, a time when the future seems limitless. In this light, embracing the past can be a great escape from this ephemeral, distracting present. Surrounded by our dormant passions and priorities, the reunion offers an opportunity to pause, take stock, and think about how we want to spend the next part of our lives.
As it turns out, such exercises are good for our health. Coined by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in his 1688 medical dissertation, the word nostalgia – from Greek nostos, or homecoming, and algos, or pain – was originally considered a disease in league with paranoia. But more recently, neuroscientists have found that nostalgia isn’t all doom and gloom. On the contrary, it can lead to self-reflection and strengthen our autobiographical memory and reward-processing systems.
Of course, we can think back to our salad days, but nothing will compare to the visceral effects of actually being there, inhaling the scent of the hallways we once ran down, digging our wedge shoes into the fresh dirt of the lawns where we used to read, or even just seeing the familiar silhouette of the freshman dorms at dusk. Ziyan Yang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Psychology, even found that nostalgia can trigger a sense of warmth, fondness and mental time travel. So we realize we have no excuse not to sign up – and to leave our husbands and children at home for maximum nostalgic impact. (We highly recommend this.)
And to our former classmates: no, we haven’t become movie producers or hedge-fund managers. It is admittedly exciting to be able to say we have a novel coming out right around the time of our reunions, a novel that may or may not go on to become an international bestseller – we are hoping for the former but are also prepared for the latter. Neither of us has made a killing on the stock market or purchased a racehorse just yet. Chances are, neither have you. (And if you have, congratulations!)
We have made up our minds. We are going to register and proudly visit the beer tent. We’re going to take it easy on each other, and respect the reunion for what it really is at heart: a chance to reunite with our beautiful younger selves – and help our alma maters raise more money.
