Posted by If you speak to any therapist, they will likely tell you that friendship matters. You can live without it. It’s not the same as oxygen or water. However, you will probably lead a richer and fuller life if you have friends.
Studies have shown that if you have friends, you usually live longer. Antisocial humans certainly exist, but generally speaking, humans are social animals. We’re meant to communicate with each other. If you live entirely cut off from everyone else, you’re subjecting yourself to mental and psychological strain.
If you lost touch with an old friend, it often makes sense to try to find them again. Luckily, you have more ways to do that than ever before. There’s remarkable connectivity in the internet age.
In this article, we’ll talk about locating an old friend. If you do that, you might be able to pick things up with them immediately, even if years have passed.
Person Lookup Sites
There are person lookup sites online, and you can use one to potentially locate a friend you haven’t seen in a while. You might even try and track someone down who you have not talked to in multiple decades.
You start by typing their name into the search engine. You can find out whether they have a spouse, whether they have a criminal record, whether they own property, and so forth.
These sites usually have a common name search function as well. Most common name searches can reveal whether many people want to find the same individual. That will not bring you closer to contacting them, but it’s always interesting to see whether there has been a lot of activity around the name you’re looking up.
These sites typically do not cost all that much, so they’re a logical place to try and locate an old friend. You might pay the fee because you’ll immediately get a full picture of this person’s life.
You might also find that this is one of your best options if you’re trying to find an old friend who doesn’t seem to want to do the whole social media thing. There are definitely some individuals who shun social media entirely. If your friend is in this category, you’ll need to resort to slightly less conventional means to try and locate them.
What to Do When You Find This Person
Some people try and hide from the world. They might attempt to rid the internet of any mention of them. Even if your friend turns out to be like this for some reason, though, you can probably still find some trace of them.
Assuming the site you use can locate this person, you might try to contact them via a social media account. You can send them an email if the site turned up an address for them. You might call if there’s a phone number or send them a text message.
There are more ways to reach out to someone than ever before, so you can pick which one seems to make the most sense. Calling your old friend is probably the most direct way to do it, but maybe you’ll hesitate to do that.
What is the Best Way to Reach Out?
The fact is that if you have not talked to your old friend in many years, you don’t know what’s going on with them. The internet and a person search might give you some crucial details, but that will hardly paint a full picture. If you have not talked to someone in twenty years, you have no way to tell what kind of road they’ve traveled.
They may little resemble the person you once knew. It’s always possible you two can pick back up like no time at all has passed, but maybe it won’t be that way at all. It could be that this person does not want to start up your friendship again.
You may want to keep that in mind when you’re thinking about reaching out to them. While calling is the most direct route, something more formal, like an email, might be better.
That all depends on what you know, or think you know, about this person. If you feel like you two had an unbreakable bond, you may feel confident enough to call.
What Might Happen?
Frankly, there’s no way to tell what might happen when you do a person lookup and then try to contact an old friend. They might feel joyful hearing from you again. The two of you might resume your friendship and remain close for many years to come.
It’s equally likely that they won’t want to hear from you. Maybe they are at a different point in their life now, and they don’t want to think about the past for some reason. They have not tried to contact you up to this point, so you might read something into that.
It takes courage to try and reconnect with someone who you have not spoken to in a long time. You might hesitate to do it, but if you do, you should feel proud of yourself for doing so, regardless of how it turns out.
What’s undeniable is that you have ways to try and find people now that did not exist in the past. Years before, if a friend moved or there was some other reason why you lost touch with them, you might not ever be able to find them again, short of hiring a private investigator or taking similar actions.
When you think about an old friendship, if you miss that person, you should at least consider what we’ve said. Since looking someone up is relatively easy and does not cost much, that can be the first step you take toward potentially reconnecting.
Once you have your old friend’s contact info, you can take some time to decide whether you want to move forward. When and if you feel ready, you can try to reestablish the friendship.
