People who lost touch pre internet.

[CarpetOfStars]

Before the internet why did people who were once so close lose touch ?
There is a column every week in the daily mail
asking for help in tracing people, people who were bridesmaids, best men at weddings, ex neighbours of many years as well as college roommates and cousins and other relatives as well as colleagues of many years especially armed forces where tight bonds were formed.
There were letters , phone calls and transport pre internet so how come people who once meant so much to each other just went off the radar?

so how come people who once meant so much to each other just went off the radar?

Same reason people lose touch today. They didn't really "mean so much" to each other. It was just convenience and mutual benefit.

It's very useful mutually to be good friends with a couple of near neighbours so you can look out for each other. Easy to go for a coffee and share life problems because you are right there. When one moves 300 miles away, turns out neither are that bothered or willing to make the effort.

True deep friendships are rare. Most are situational and based on mutual benefit. Colleagues are almost never true friends at all, it can look like that because of length of time working together and sharing personal secrets but its just about location.

I read somewhere that if you look at any photograph of a group including a wedding photograph, after about 10 years most won't be in your lives as social contacts have life cycles based on proximity and move on.

It makes you wonder why people feel the urge to get in touch many years later . Maybe they are terminally ill and just want to tie up some loose ends or just reminisce before they die .

Keeping track of friends was much harder, especially if you left your hometown to go to university, and after graduation as people moved around, changing addresses and phone numbers.
Then life gets in the way, looking after children, long term relationships and work often didn’t leave a lot of spare time to find people who had maybe moved half a dozen times in 3 years, and write letters to addresses that were maybe out of date.
Now I’m retired and it’s been absolutely wonderful to reconnect with old friends.
Time just rolls away and the essence of their personality is still very clear. It’s been one of the greatest joys of this year to reconnect properly after 30 years with my first school friend, and she is just as fun, kind and wonderful as when we were in infant school together.

The main reason is somebody moves away.
I haven't found reconnecting with people from 30 years ago to be all that fun. They turned out to be nothing at all like I remembered them. We leave very different lives

Because before the internet ‘keeping in touch’ meant that you had to get an address and phone number for someone and actually write to them or phone them to stay in contact (which also meant you needed to know you were seeing someone for the last time, and consider whether you wanted to keep in touch).

Post-internet, there’s an entire category of people you can like, but don’t feel all that strongly about, but you can follow them on Instagram with a click and know roughly what’s going on in their lives, and have the option of getting in contact at will.

Losing touch is understandable but it’s quite odd how many people feel the need to reconnect with random people from their past. Just move on and make new friends. People come and go in your life at different stages and that’s normal.

Or they just think ‘I wonder what happened to X?’

I guess that’s why people used to cry when they left people after a college , workplace or neighbourhood. Deep down they knew they would gradually drift apart and lose touch .

Not in my experience, and I was in my late 20s before the internet happened. I mean, most of those relationships will still be situational, regardless, but pre-internet you had to think harder about who you wanted to stay in touch with. I mean, we had address books…😃

I moved away, to the other side of the world 47 years ago, yes writing and then emailing dropped away as life happened. But when I physically met up with friends last year(the ones I spent every possible second with from 8 to 20) it was like picking up the conversation where we left off. Have we messaged/written/whatsapped since? About 3 times.

I don't entirely agree. I think it's natural to want to see people you were once close to but moved away etc. It's very common to do this even when you have other, new, friends too!

I do agree that it's natural for friends to come and go, though

33 years ago I moved from the village where I lived, 350 miles north. I left behind some wonderful friends and I had written everyone's addresses down in a beautiful address book that they had bought me as a leaving gift.

During the move the book was lost. It had all the phone numbers in too and the only person whose phone number I knew off by heart (it was a small village and we'd just go round and knock on each other's doors rather than ringing) had just moved and got a new phone number.

So, to all those people, I just fell off the planet. I still think about them and hope they know that I didn't just cut them out of my life.

It was really really easy to lose touch.

I had a good friend at university. Pre email. Pre general mobile phones.

After uni we both moved to new cities to start a graduate traineeships. We were both busy and had lots going on. Neither of us made the effort to call each other and provide new phone numbers or addresses.

By the time I tried to reach out her parents had downsized and their phone number changed. So no way for me to find her.

I got married and changed my name.

When I got Facebook a decade later I tried to find her but of course by this time she had also changed surname.

She finally found me on Facebook earlier this year (I have an unusual first name so easier to track down)

We plan to meet up at Christmas, it’s been 30 years since we last saw each other.

I can understand why letter writing would fade away but a catch up once a year via a Christmas card or a phone call once a year wouldn’t have taken up much effort . I suppose it’s out of sight out of mind and it’s difficult to write about the mundane things of life on a regular basis. Back then phone calls especially abroad were expensive.

Not everyone had a phone.

My Granny lost touch with her sister in Australia when she moved and the letter she sent with her new address didn’t arrive. Then we moved, but the letter with our new address went to her old address.

They only got back in touch by absolute sheer fluke when my Granny met an Australian woman on holiday and got chatting. The woman absolutely loved the royal family and my granny mentioned she grew up near Balmoral. The woman said “oh my colleague grew up near Balmoral…” and 40 years of lost touch was solved.

That’s so sad and so frustrating.

Wow 😮 a real sliding doors moment . I bet her sister must have been very upset for years thinking her sister had ghosted her . A lovely happy ending .

Regarding Christmas, the way people kept in touch was through the now much derided, round robin letter, which Incidently I still love receiving, or notes scribbled in Christmas and birthday cards.

I lost touch with lots of people that I regret losing touch with.
It's not that they didn't mean much. It just required a lot more to keep in contact and life gets in the way.

You stay in touch with people you want to stay in touch with for the most part.

The stories like the sister and the missing letter or a lost address book are rare and in the world of email and mobile phones vanishingly so. And lets face it @Vroomfondleswaistcoat there are things you could have done if you'd been that bothered about staying in touch with any of them. Sure it might have been inconvenient and possibly expensive but if for example one of them had the key to your safe or was your Mr Right or had a book you'd left a winning lottery ticket in, you'd definitely have bothered.

A relationship is a two way street and if you lose touch with someone, it means both of you couldn't be bothered not just you. So at the end of the day, neither has lost much.

Idle curiosity and musing about what someone from years ago is up today is not the same as a real desire to reconnect and establish a real working day to day friendship.

I agree with this.
It is such an odd question. It seems pretty obvious how easy it was to lose touch with someone when you have to physically write them a letter and post it, or try to call their home and catch them at a time thy were in (that is, if their home had a phone).

But it is normal and natural to wonder what happened to people from 'back in the day'.
Since my dc grew up and I've had more time (and indeed, more 'spending money'), I have rekindled friendships with quite a few people who I had drifted apart from. It is a lovely part of my life now that I meet various groups for lunch a couple of times a year or we meet couples who we used to be great friends with but who we didn't get much chance to see when we were in the trenches of having small children, no time and not much money.

This is reminding me of the " Friend face" episode of the IT crowd.

I graduated in 1986 from medical school. I think a lot of us lost touch as we were working 120 hours a week and just were exhausted.
I had my 40 year reunion recently, a lot of us have connected again over the years and there is a FB group. I met a guy there who I hadn't seen for 40 years, we still recognised each other and had a big hug and it was like yesterday. I was sad some of us lost touch.
School was the same. I moved away and never went back. I've had a couple of reunions and we do have a small WhatsApp group. My dad is still down there so I have gone out with them occasionally but when he goes(he's 94) I'll have no reason to go down.

They were both very upset for years as they each thought the other was ignoring them. They both sent follow up letters, but they didn’t get there (I’m still slightly annoyed with the long-dead man who bought Granny & Grandads house as he could easily have passed letters that arrived after the mail redirect finished to Granny’s friend next door. It was a very very small village so he knew, but he was well known as a nasty piece of work).

Thankfully they were in touch again for the last 15 years of my Granny’s life :)

I do love a round robin in a Christmas card or Christmas email.

I never know why they are so derided. But then I’m nosy and like hearing what folks’ children and grandkids have been up to.