Dear Carolyn: My now-boyfriend and I went to high school together, but we didn’t become a couple until nearly 10 years later. While we were classmates, we ran in completely different circles. He was a popular, funny and athletic class clown; I was friendless, nerdy (though not especially successful academically) and lonely, and I dealt with an eating disorder. It took the neutralizing power of adult life to make it possible for us to really “see” each other.
Anyway, we are going to a 15-year reunion event, and I am oddly nervous. He is going to be among lots of friends, and I’ll be among the people who made me feel like a total outcast. I have considered not going, but he really wants us to go together and promises me he’ll be supportive.
At the very best, I worry that it’ll be unpleasant; at worst, he might see me in my old element and wonder why he is with me now. How do I make the best of this event? Why do they have high school reunions, anyway?
— She’s All That
She’s All That: The “neutralizing power of adult life” didn’t work its magic on only you and your boyfriend.
The disorienting power of adolescent life didn’t push you alone to feel like an outcast.
The point of a reunion, besides selling name tags and Spanx, is to celebrate the power of common experience, with full awareness that experience wasn’t always something to celebrate.
Yours happened to have been acutely painful, and it’s normal to turn inward in response to pain — nothing “oddly” about it. However, you have a lot to be proud of, and your classmates are also experiencing some mix of curiosity, pride, apprehension and self-doubt.
Not everyone will have used the past 15 years to get over themselves and the wide range of things to get over, sure, and you will of course feel vulnerable around them. But people in their 30s still sorting by popularity are more to be pitied than feared.
I almost didn’t mention this, because it tilts toward a winning-and-losing attitude, which is the wrong one. But having a mental game plan for those who treat you “like a total outcast”— or, also icky, people who up your value by hot-guy association — can help with the flare-ups of old terror as you’re about to walk into a room.
Otherwise, reunions are a chance to square up and meet others from a shared point of origin. It is the nature of perspective that we can’t predict how it will feel — but a brave attitude alone can tilt things your way.
Plus, if you have no expectations beyond some open-bar anthropology, people might surprise you. They can get disarmingly honest as the years pile up, and, through the right lens, even bluster has kitsch value. Ask your classmates about themselves. Harvest narratives. Decide for yourself how they reflect on you, if at all. You might surprise yourself.
You might learn much about your boyfriend that’s available nowhere else.
You can also do all this great introspection only to decide you don’t care. Great then, say no. Your boyfriend will manage. I’m spelling out why you might not hate it or why it might be worthwhile even if you do hate it, not why I think you should go.
But even if you’re unmoved in your conviction that reunions are just bad liquor and worse people, there’s this: If you stay home in any part out of fear that your relationship can’t take it, then you will always fear that your relationship can’t take it. Fear decisions in general leave an aftertaste of regret.
