The high-school reunion is, as far as popular imagination tells it, dead—or, at the least, in extended hospice care. The New York Times declared it a vanishing institution in 2011; it was “deflated” and “old-fashioned,” lost to the whims of a then-emerging social-media era that promised (or perhaps threatened) on-demand connection to anyone we used to know, particularly for those of us who were graduating high school amid the rise of Facebook. Whereas late-1990s films such as Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and Grosse Pointe Blank contained memorable depictions, by the new millennium, the reunion had largely disappeared from pop culture. Now it has been relegated to the realm of wistful articles, added to the glowing funeral pyre of cultural entities—breakfast cereals, bar soap, chain restaurants, and so forth—that Millennials have been accused of abandoning.But old customs, apparently, die hard. Today, a decade and a half on from that Times piece, the high-school reunion remains a bizarrely unkillable institution in American public life. The ritual floats on, coming around each summer like the willow warbler or the common cuckoo. Look to Reddit, the public square of our time, and you’ll find dozens of recent discussion threads; on Facebook, reunion planning is scattered across an unwieldy network of high school “Class of” groups. Katie McCarty, a vice president at the company Reunion Specialists (and a member of the National Association of Reunion Managers), told me that after the pandemic-shutdown era, the industry is seeing more excitement and participation, including a surge in events in the fall.I became interested in reunions because my next one was about to come up, and my best friend, Zachary, and I—he’s the Romy; I’m the Michele—played chicken for months about whether to attend. We’d gone to the 10-year, but just a few months before the 20th, the event itself was threatened when our class president abruptly withdrew from their organizing duties, leaving a rump caucus to plan it instead. The end result would be a chill bar night in our town in suburban Tacoma, Washington, for which Zachary felt a deep ambivalence; persuading him to attend the 10-year had already been a herculean task. “High school is,” he told me, “a dark part of my life that I don’t want to revisit.” As for me, whatever posturing impulse had compelled my attendance at the 10-year had dimmed considerably. I’d also convinced myself that the reunion had lost its relevance; when we ultimately decided to skip, it felt like an easy decision.At the same time, a parallel reunion drama was playing out elsewhere in my life, starring my mother. She had recently attended her own 50-year event and walked out of it with a surprise: a rekindled friendship with a very nice man she’s known since high school. Now they’re having a cross-country romance, two widows who’ve found love again in their 70s. Unlike me, she didn’t seem to have much in the way of hang-ups about enjoying her reunion, nor, it seems, do many of her fellow Boomers. (McCarty told me that 50- and 60-year events are now being planned in higher numbers.) Meanwhile, many people in my cohort of 10- and 20-year attendees are facing a conundrum similar to mine; lots of those Reddit threads on reunions are focused on the question of whether to attend in the first place. Far from being dead, reunions exist now in a zone of distortion, a weird gray area in which many people feel obligated to go without quite knowing why. I have a soft sense of sadness about missing out, and when I spoke with Zachary, he also shared some regret over our absence. To put the experience in Romy and Michele terms, I wonder if our choice to skip the 20-year wasn’t cool at all; in fact, I fear that it may have been totally lame. The origin of reunions is unclear; scholarship on the tradition is scarce. They seem to have begun appearing on social calendars in the late 19th century, in some cases inspired by college-alumni events; in the early 20th century, they trickled down to high schools. By the 1980s, high-school reunions were widely depicted in popular culture: Falling in Love Again (1980), National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1982), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). By the time I was cruising Blockbuster Video aisles in the late ’90s, the must-rent specter of Romy and Michele, the protagonists respectively clad in their pink and lavender outfits, loomed large. The film solidified the reunion as a rite of passage, and imprinted in me what the experience of going to my own might someday be like: earnest, awkward, perhaps triumphant, and a referendum on what I’d done with my life once it had well and truly begun.The ritual became a source of academic fascination too. In 1996, the sociologists Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Robert Zussman published a study on reunions, which Vinitzky-Seroussi spun off into a book. They posit the high-school reunion as a form of “autobiographical occasion,” a moment in which a version of the self is constructed in relation to other people. (More examples of such events: a first date, a visit to a therapist, the construction of a résumé.) That framing struck me as a scholarly way of saying that people go to these things not necessarily because they care about seeing old friends but because reunions are a moment to reckon with whom we’ve become.[Read: What I learned about life at my 30th college reunion]Despite the lack of robust research on—and slowdown in cultural depictions of—reunions, Vinitzky-Seroussi believes that people are still interested in attending them, especially post-pandemic. “There is a strength to face-to-face interaction that I think COVID taught us how to care about again,” she told me. The high-school reunion also stands distinct among other autobiographical events by appearing rarely, usually just once a decade or so, like a comet.Another mass-experience event may have further reinvigorated the reunion: the Great Social-Media Algorithmic Revision of 2016, wherein Instagram stopped serving chronological content based on whom you followed, and started showing posts based on a weighted “best” calculation. Influencers and creators became the primary drivers of social networks. Today, social-media users are more likely to be shown a post from, say, the Turn Up Twins than from the twin sisters you sat next to in math class. The entity that supposedly killed the reunion has been completely reformatted; it’s not as easy as it once was to keep up with acquaintances. “I’m not sure if young people today really are more connected,” Vinitzky-Seroussi told me. “They’re certainly more busy—but are they more connected, especially with those they grew up with? I don’t think that’s true.” The reunion, in other words, may still be one of the few ways to find out what’s truly happening in the lives of old classmates.Romy and Michele has, I think not coincidentally, found fans among people who grew up in a world where social media is the norm. Robin Schiff, the film’s writer, told me that when she recently went to a screening in Los Angeles, she was initially surprised to see so many attendees who likely hadn’t even been born when the movie debuted. “I was shocked,” she told me. “There’s pictures of me looking around with my mouth open.” People may like the movie for reasons other than the reunion itself, of course: It’s rooted in today’s current vogue for the pop culture of the 1990s, which some people would argue is nostalgia for the pre-social-media era. And Schiff credits her film’s enduring popularity to its central female friendship. She pointed out, for instance, that Romy and Michele passed the Bechdel test before it became a popular measure, in the 2000s.[Read: Facebook is just Craigslist now]But the emotions that drive people to go to reunions may not be so different from the ones that drive people to look up classmates on social media, or to post about their own life in the first place: People figure out who they are by comparing themselves with others. “There’s just something,” Schiff told me, “about discovering you were a lot cooler than the people you grew up with.” Looking back, I definitely had some ego stuff at play when deciding to attend my 10-year reunion. Although I was a decent student and active in theater, no one would mistake me for having peaked in high school; I lacked a main “thing,” and as such lacked certainty as to where my life might lead. Meanwhile, Zachary, as a newly out gay teenager in the early aughts, more or less hated everything about high school; he opted to finish senior year at community college, before departing the suburbs immediately for chicer environs.By 2013, though, I’d done enough professionally to feel like attending would be validating. I convinced Zachary to go; we arrived joined at the hip as the co-founders of a successful coffee website (this is roughly the Millennial equivalent of having invented the Post-it note). Many moments affirmed what I’d imagined from the reunion’s depiction in film; by the end of the night, I’d wound up at an after-party at someone’s house where we used to hang out, talking and laughing and remembering old times. I suppose some people were impressed by my career accomplishments; I suppose this was gratifying to me, in a way that helped pave over the big question marks I’d once felt about my purpose in life. I recall Zachary flirting with an old crush somewhere over in the kitchen, locked in conversation so earnest and trenchant, you may as well have put on the soundtrack to The Big Chill.[Read: What adults forget about friendship]Yet the satisfaction of the experience seemed deeper than a self-esteem boost. When I spoke with Schiff, she cut to the core of my recollections. “When you go to your own reunion, you release a lot of stuff that you’ve been carrying around and holding on to, this image you have of who you are,” Schiff said. “High school is frozen in time, so what you’re releasing is really like a version of yourself.”What did Zachary and I sacrifice by staying home for the 20-year reunion? The 10-year is preserved in our minds as a significant moment (we’ve since repeatedly dissected the evening’s minutiae); perhaps attending our 20th would have given our friendship a new set of memories and experiences to draw from. And I keep thinking about something else Schiff told me. She’s hard at work on a Romy and Michele sequel, with Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow reprising their roles, and though she wouldn’t divulge much about the plot, she did tell me that the film won’t be about another high-school reunion. I was shocked by this, but Schiff is convinced that the soul of the original film—and why it still resonates with people—is its vivid depiction of a friendship across time.Zachary and I are very different people now—not just since high school, but since the 10-year. That event was booze-soaked; Zachary is now many years sober. Back then, our business together felt like a lark, a fluke of luck; 10 years later, we’ve built our lives around it, with children and spouses and dogs. In Romy and Michele, the duo actually attend their reunion for roughly only 30 minutes of the movie; the majority of the story is their journey, their lives together, leading up to the event. The ritual is a save point, a moment to examine oneself—and one’s relationships—from yesterday to the present. Maybe what I’m sad about isn’t necessarily missing the reunion itself, but whatever new wrinkle might have developed in my lifelong bond with Zachary: the chance for more inside jokes, more memory-making, more conjoined recoiling-in-horror alongside my best friend. The chance to release the previous version of ourselves, and to witness each other’s growth. “How far I’ve come, or how not far others have come,” Vinitzky-Seroussi told me, “can only be found out during a reunion.” In this way, its role as a familiar calendar entity argues profoundly for itself, unsinkable and ever-long.