I’m not sure why, but my closest friends in high school, except for two, were in different classes, so they wouldn’t be at my reunion. I hadn’t heard from one of the two friends in my class for a long time, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t going to the reunion. The other one and I had stayed in touch, and had both drifted back in and out of the town where the high school was, and I knew she wasn’t going.
The woman in charge of the reunion was someone I disliked, and most of my friends had disliked since elementary school. She was in charge of the 15th and the 20th as well. Someone else was in charge of the 25th, and hounded me to go, because I was back in town, and they really wanted a big group for that one. They were having a barbecue (meat, meat, and would you like meat with that), and playing sports. No thanks. There was a charge to go. If they had a 30th, it was last year, and they didn’t bother to track me down. I guess they’ve given up on me.
If I am still alive for the 70th reunion, I might go just to see who else is also still alive. Other than that, forget it.
Our high school has never had any reunions. I figured it was more of a US thing.
(Humming Springsteen’s “Glory Days” as I type this.)
ETA: Unlike a lot of you here, I loved high school. The work was easy. I had lots of friends, and it really was one of the best times in my life. Doesn’t mean I want to go back though.
5, 10, 15 etc year reunions aren’t really a thing in Australia. My year didn’t have a 10 year reunion but I was on the organising committee for our first ever reunion, so I went to that. We’ve had only one since and I didn’t attend because I’d gained heaps of weight.
This IS how they’re done at our school - they lump four years together simply to get enough attendees to make it worthwhile, which indicates a poor turnout percentage since my year had 700 people. Because my siblings are each a year apart, there was a point when all four of us were in HS together, and the other three go to the reunions.
I lived out of state until last year, but truth is I wouldn’t have bothered even if I lived in town. Despite what John Hughes taught us, high school wasn’t this significant period full of life-changing experiences that shaped me forever. What I saw of my classmates in school didn’t foster the least desire to associate with them outside of school, then or after. Really, I’ve never gotten America’s cultural obsession with the period.
I found college much more interesting all around, and a girl from my HS came up to me during freshman year and said she’d seen me interact with more people in a single class than she’d seen me bother with in junior high and high school combined.
Never got an invitation, nor would I have attended if I had. Recently I came across a Facebook page for my high school’s 20-year reunion and didn’t recognize a single name on the list of people who attended, except for the girl I had a hopeless crush on.
However, a long time ago, I did get an invitation, addressed to somebody else, for the reunion of the high school I would have attended if I hadn’t moved out of the district in 9th Grade. I recognized the person’s name (apparently he’d been the previous tenant of my apartment) as well as many names of people scheduled to attend, and I gave serious thought to showing up pretending to be that person. Chickened out, though.
They decided to send out the invitations fairly last minute on Facebook. I had a lot of crap going on, and didn’t see the invitation until it was over.
I say invitation, but it was really an invitation to the group, where they would have then invited you. If you weren’t in the “Class of 2003” group, you didn’t get an event invitation.
I still may not have gone due to the aforementioned stuff, but it would have been nice for it to have been my decision. And my life in general was a lot better at that point, so it really was a decision.
Does anyone not go because they are too self conscious about what they have or haven’t done? It’s just, you hear about that sometimes…people are afraid others might think of them as failures.
What’s your definition of a small class? My high school class had 30 people in it.
I didn’t go for reasons similar to what’s been posted above. I already stay in contact with any of my old friends and don’t need a reunion to see them. Even more so, thanks to Facebook.
Hubby has maintained close friendship with one of his school friends (actually from way back in elementary school!) and kept in touch with several others. But a few years ago he declined not to attend his high school reunion. He did want to see his friends, though, so we invited them over to our house for drinks the afternoon before the reunion. It was nice and we all had a good time. Later we learned that at the reunion, someone got up to the podium and read off the names of all the deceased classmates. One of which was hubby’s name. We were told that someone replied “Are you sure about that? Because I was at his house about an hour ago and he looked fine.”
Same reason I didn’t go to the 20th (which was actually just a few months ago): I never lost touch with the people I liked from high school (and still see the core group regularly), so why bother going to a reunion to see all the other people I didn’t?
ETA: plus I went to a huge high school, and the likelihood of even recognizing a small fraction of the small fraction of people who bothered to attend a reunion would be very low, and judging by the Facebook photos of the reunions, I was right.
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Nope. I went to high school in a tiny town on a tiny island in rural Alaska. Since upon graduation, I promptly moved far, far away and have essentially zero inclination to move back, the logistics and expense of attending far, far outweigh any desire I might have to attend. If I happened to be in town during one (my parents still spend half the year there, so it’s possible I could be visiting them), I might show up, but it’s a small enough town that I would have probably already run into and chatted with anyone I had any inclination to talk to.
Frankly, a goodly portion of the reason I moved far, far away the moment I graduated is that I don’t have much of anything in common with the folks I went to school with who stayed in town. Hell, I didn’t have much in common with them when I’d spent the previous 18 years spending time with them - I have even less in common with them now. Small town gossip being what it is, my mom and brother (and Facebook) keep me as informed as I care to be about the people I’m even a little bit curious about.
10-year: Didn’t feel I’d accomplished enough. I’d had a great senior year, got a full scholarship to a local university, and graduated with honors. Within 3 months of graduating college, I was working at a grocery store. By the time my 10 year reunion rolled around, I’d moved on to an office job, but still, it was a far cry from what I’d dreamed of (being a psychologist or a writer).
20-year: Same as 10-year, now in an office/admin job, with the added bonus of being ashamed of my weight. At my “fattest” point in senior year, I weighed 140lbs. By my 20-year reunion, I weighed between 225 and 270lbs. Also, I had some health and psych issues that made me feel even more self-conscious.
The silly thing is, looking back, I probably should have gone to the reunions! The people from HS that I run into in both real life and online seem to remember me positively. I tried to apologize to one of them who contacted me on FB, if I’d come off as standoff-ish at the time (I was, and still am, on the shy side), and she was amazed. No, she’d never thought that about me at all! Huh. :smack:
I need to remind myself that despite my dark and sarcastic side, I’m basically likeable, God help me.
Didn’t graduate from high school (dropped out a couple of months into my junior year, enrolled in college, took the GED a year or so later so I could apply for grants/loans).
On the plus side, I never get email from Classmates.com…
I was deployed to Japan at the time. For the 20th, I was living in Germany. For the 30th, I was living in Africa. I did make the 40th, and was involved in the planning, and figured out that once in a lifetime was plenty, and I hadn’t missed anything whatsoever.
