I just sent an email to our HS Reunion contact person and asked that she remove my name from their mailing list.
I loathed high school, and never gave going to my 10 year reunion a second thought. I’ve friended some of my classmates on facebook, and although I don’t hate them any more, I still have no reason to fly 1000 miles to hang out with people who ignored or tormented me in high school.
Actually, some of them are still really attractive, I might go for some drunken hookups. Hmm…
No, it’s not just you. I went to my 10th but skipped the others.
I have never been to a reunion, a big one is coming up and am thinking about it.
but most of my friends were in the year after.
There are a few (~5) people I’d might want to sync up with, am wondinering if they would be the type to show up.
Brian
I’ve gone to almost all our class reunions,except the 30th, where they dropped the ball and forgot to invite most everyone, and I’ve enjoyed them. I find it fascinating to see how much people have changed, both physically and emotionally. We’ve had some dramatic moments, like when we all assumed that the former police officer who was currently in jail wouldn’t attend, and he did, on the arm of his lawyer, or when classmates who had married and divorced both attended and stayed on opposite sides of the room (hmmm…that was the same guy!). We had two classmates sit next to each other at dinner and shyly confess to each other how they always had a crush on each other back in the day…and they are now happily married to each other! It has been fascinating to see who held on to the petty divisions among groups, and who is now just a really great person after being such a jerk! And then there was the year I was having a secret fling with a former classmate, and we had a great time pretending we weren’t just seeing each other again for the first time in years!
This year is our 35th, and we’ve been organizing it mostly via Facebook, which has been a huge icebreaker! Some classmates who never seemed very religious have become extremely conservative religiously, and others have bandied about political positions that it is truly nice to know about in advance, so we can avoid those topics! One of our class has revealed that he is awaiting a double lung transplant and might not make it due to his illness. Few of us would have known about his condition if this reunion hadn’t been planned, and since he’s fairly shut-in, he’s enjoying getting to talk to all of us that he lost touch with.
All in all, I find reunions a great chance for personal growth. I can see how the assumptions I made about some people were based on my own biases, and I can see the different paths that my former friends have taken. But I’ve talked to many from our class who hate reunions, and one in particular who was hurt and offended by something that happened at our tenth and won’t ever come back. In that case, it’s funny how we perceive events and motivations differently. Now granted, awarding a pack of condoms as a gag gift for the classmate with the most children at our tenth year reunion is tacky. But when half the classmates haven’t even gotten married yet, and those of us who were had only one or two kids…to show up happily married with five children, when you were one of the girls no one thought would ever get married…well, I took the condoms as a light-hearted joke and sort of a jealous praise for attaining what many of us longed for and didn’t yet have. She was personally highly offended (even though no one knew in advance who would be winning that prize) and still mad 25 years later.
And believe me, I was not one of the in-crowd in high school, and at these reunions I still tend to sit and talk to my close circle of friends, whom I see all the time anyhow! But that fact is in itself something that other groups in the class are a bit wistful about…the fact that the seven (now six, one passed) of us have stayed as close as we are since seventh grade.
So I’m going, and will be amused to see how many of us still keep talking on Facebook when it’s over!
I haven’t received invitations to any of my reunions; my mother still lives at the same address and I’m on classmates.com, so it’s not like I’d be that hard to find. I doubt anyone from high school even remembers who I am.
I’ve never wanted to go to mine because everyone was such an asshole then. Then one day I realize, HEY they were acting just like teenagers, duh!
I have a 30th reunion for grade school coming up in two weeks. I normally would have blown this off like my high school one, but two things happened. FB and my childhood best friend is flying in from CA just for this 3 hour shindig. It will be the only time I can see her.
FB had made me realize everyone changes, and we are not all evil assholes anymore. Most of them are posting comments to my crap on FB instead of me stalking their comment sections. So, I’ve got that going for me. They all have thing thing called 'careers and excellent jobs and some money and are probably skinnier than me and stuff. What they don’t have I gots. I gots the words and powerz of observation.
This is basically how I feel. I didn’t go to any until the 15th, and then it was for some pretty lame reasons, now that i think of it. i distinctly remember telling my Mom that I wanted to go so that people could see that I wasn’t such a loser after all.
Imagine my surprise when I got there and it didn’t seem like people had thought I was such a loser in the first place. Most of them had been too busy worrying about their own loser-dom or whatever. I’d been thinking that how I felt all those years inside was 100% reflective of how others saw me. What an adolescent way to think! I was certainly not popular in school, and had a whole boatload of problems, but mostly they were internal.
Anyhow, tomorrow night is my 25th and I am going.
I’m looking forward to my first reunion, actually - I believe there will be one at the ten-year mark. It should be interesting to see what people are up to, and it’d be good to see my hometown again - I’ve not been back in a couple years.
I could see the point in the past but now? I don’t know. I mean if I wanted to keep in touch with anyone from high school, I could do so, through online groups and such.
My name is very unique. Even if you spelled it really wrong, a quick Google check of it still points to my website where you could email me. No one has ever done it. No big deal, but it becomes obvious no one wants to get in touch with me. OK fair enough.
I don’t see anything wrong with reunions, but what’s really the point. To see how people turned out? OK to satisfy curiosity perhaps, but is that going to really make my life any better. Of course the flip side is, is knowing going to make it worse? No, so I see it as a neutral kind of thing.
Let’s face it if something happened to you 20 years ago, you should be over it by now.
I’ve met people who were Holocaust survivors that seem to manage to get on with their life a lot better than John Doe, who’s mad 25 years later, 'cause some tart called him a “geek” or “fat” or whatever
I’m right there with you. **Markxxx **has a very valid point, and I am “over it” now and do correspond with two or three people I knew in school. Never the less, I really don’t have any desire to reunite with these folks as a group. My folks have bugged me about it, especially since I often visit the area around the time of the reunion (Memorial Day). My usual retort is that I would rather have a colonoscopy–which is technically true, as that procedure is a valuable test that carries many benefits.
Didn’t even consider going to my 10 year HS reunion. Apparently I wasn’t alone because reports back were that out of a class of over 500, only about 50 people showed up.
Besides, everyone I knew in high school who I considered worth knowing I never lost touch with anyway.
I find school reunions a hoot. Like a sporadic get-together with a largely dysfunctional extended family. It’s nice to be reminded of hilarious things you’d forgotten, stuff you never knew, and to momentarily ponder your secret care factor scale when you find out who’s dead. There’s something strangely comforting about reunions; in the same way slothing about in your pyjamas and sleeping on the lounge is.
I feel the same way. Out of a graduating class of about 300, I’ve only kept in semi-regular touch with two people (calling them once or twice year, actually seeing them only once every two or three years).
I wanted to go to my 5 year reunion and I talked to a lot of other from my class who were interested as well but none of us heard anything and that included the prom queen. I’ve got my 10 year coming up next year and it we actually have one that I’ll be there.
There are a lot of people who I’m curious what happened to but don’t care enough to google/facebook stalk them. Also to be fair I’m in better shape then I was in high school, and I was one of the jocks, and am quite successful so since I lived up to my potential I’m looking forward to showing that off.
A few years ago was my 20th and I had zero interest in attending. I’m not holding a grudge or anything like that, I just can’t see any reason to go. My 25th is coming up but honestly I’d rather spend my time and money on other things.
Hate to break it to you Oredigger77, but this is the case for EVERYONE after only 10 years…see how you feel in another decade or two…
I didn’t go to my 10 year reunion. I didn’t see the point. I didn’t have a bad time in high school. I was a decent student, I got along with everyone, I had no enemies, my teachers liked me. I have happy memories from high school and I do still sometimes miss it. But, I rarely miss the people. I miss the structure and the learning.
I am not a fan of large gatherings (I didn’t even go to my prom). I am also fairly easy to find so if anyone had wanted to find me they could have very easily. I am still best friends with the same person I was best friends with in high school. I am also still friends with my oldest friend (we met in 2nd grade).
According to my 2 friends, people actually wanted to know what was going on with me and wondered why I wasn’t there and even 2 years after the reunion they still insist I made a mistake in not going.
I still really don’t care and I’m not sorry I didn’t go. Since the reunion happened, I have reconnected with most of my closest friends through Facebook and even with that connection we still rarely talk to each other.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Of my 2 friends and me, we’re all between 50 and 100 pounds heavier than we were in high school and not one of us did what we were supposed to do after high school. I am supposed to be either a military officer or a doctor by now. I’m an unemployed factory worker. I can’t even blame the economy since my last employer was still hiring when I got laid off. I am unemployed because I got hurt at work and the surgery didn’t adequately fix the problem.
If I get my financial aid, I’ll be going back to college in the fall to finish my Bachelor’s. After that, I may just fulfill that medical school dream. I’d graduate right in time for my 20th reunion. Even with that M.D. after my name, I still probably wouldn’t go to my 20th.
My 30th is this year – I went to my 25th (first of any of my reunions I’d been to), and enjoyed it for the most part. I recently joined FB to catch up, and see if there were people I’d want to make the effort to see in person at the reunion.
Nope. The people I knew in HS are extremely conservative right wingers, at least according to their FB pages (obviously not necessarily all of them, just the ones from my HS class who are also on FB whose profiles I’ve seen). Fine, if that’s the way they want to be, but I’d rather not drive a couple of hours knowing I really have nothing in common with them.
Plus, geographically, it’s too close to me to spend the night, and too far to drive (that’s not literally true, I drive it often enough, but I don’t want to leave there at midnight and get home at 2-3 in the morning – that’s what I mean by too far).
Go to a reunion if you feel you want to see/hang out with the people. Me? There are a number of things I’d rather do.