Connection regret is one of the four main types of regret, but it is possible to rekindle old friendships.
Cali and Sarah used to be thick as thieves. “We became best friends in year 9 and were inseparable during all of high school,” Cali says. But after school finished, Cali, who’s now 50, took a gap year. Over the ensuing years, as Cali went to university to study teaching and Sarah launched a small business, the pair drifted apart to the point of losing touch altogether.Fifteen years passed before Cali decided to reach out to Sarah.
From the moment they sat down, their friendship was back on track. “It was like no time had passed; it was very easy,” Cali says. “There was no small talk chit-chat, it was sharing the big things straight away. We were both really happy to reconnect.” They might also be worried about how badly that contact will go, says clinical psychologist and Headspace app mental health expert Mary Spillane. “We often do this thing as humans called ‘effective forecasting’, where we have a tendency to overestimate how we’ll feel about a situation in the future,” Spillane says. That often leads us to assume that events or interactions will go worse than they really will.