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Betty Freireich Niznik did not want to go to her high-school reunion last month.

Other than two close friends, no one from Montreal's Wagar High School had contacted the now 50-year-old Thornhill, Ont., resident in the 33 years since her graduation. She considered her long-ago relationships with high-school buddies long over.

But since reluctantly attending the July 7 event, Ms. Freireich Niznik has come to regard some of her onetime classmates as true friends.

"What I came to conclude after the reunion is that the friendships I have had since are all very superficial," she said. "With high-school friends, there's full acceptance immediately. You don't have to explain yourself, you don't have to define yourself. You are who you are."

Ms. Freireich Niznik is one of a growing number of Canadians seeking out retro friendships, using high-school reunions, Google searches and social networking sites to rekindle relationships that ended decades ago. While some dismiss this social sleuthing as nothing more than online nostalgia, many are deciding that the only true friends are those you made first.

"People want to reconnect," said Barry Wellman, director of the University of Toronto's NetLab, who studies virtual communities and friendship. "I think there's a certain point in life when people start looking back."

Wanda Arsenault Gaudet, a 38-year-old mother of two who lives in Summerside, PEI, hadn't been in touch with her childhood friends since she moved away from Edmonton's Castle Downs neighbourhood in the mid-1980s.

Back then, she was inseparable from two girls, Liz and Lisa, who lived in her townhouse complex and were in her class at Wellington Junior High School.

She lost touch with both upon moving east, but found herself thinking about them more often as the years passed and her adult friendships proved unsatisfying.

With women her age busy with jobs, husbands and kids, Ms. Arsenault Gaudet said there is little opportunity to bond, and she misses the connection she had with Liz and Lisa.

Then, earlier this year, her 14-year-old daughter introduced her to Facebook, and she set about trying to find her former friends.

After an eight-week search, she tracked down the women she had not seen in 18 years, and now talks to them almost every day.

"I just always wondered what they're doing," she said. "Now it's just like we're back in Castle Downs."

In June, TNS Canadian Facts, a market research group, found that many social network members were middle-aged. A cross-Canada study of Internet users found that 45 per cent of people in their 40s had visited a social networking site, as had one-third of people in their 50s or older.

Ms. Freireich Niznik believes her adolescent friendships may have been preserved had the Internet existed when she was growing up. She said the prohibitive cost of long-distance phone calls and travel is to blame for the loss of contact between many members of her generation.

"We had sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, but no Internet," she said. "Too much information but not enough information."

Unable to maintain contact with old friends, Ms. Freireich Niznik said she made do with new ones through circumstance - relationships built around common neighbourhoods, jobs and parent-teacher groups.

She believes friendships forged during high-school years are more legitimate, based on real tastes, interests and upbringings.

"I think your youth does define you," she said. "I really believe it does."

Reesa Shurgold, who lives in Richmond Hill, Ont., is one of the Wagar High alumni who reconnected with old friends after the reunion.

She moved to Toronto in the early 1980s, and said that between work and raising her kids as a single mom, she had no time for a social life.

Ms. Shurgold describes rekindling these old friendships on the reunion's website under the subject line, "There's no friend like an old friend."

"Our lives for the most part are quite different," she said. "But the bond is unbelievable."

Upon walking into the reunion, she said that something just clicked and she instantly felt more like herself.

"I was on an island somehow and suddenly all these life preservers were thrown at me and reminded me of who I was," she said. "We'll probably be friends for the rest of our lives now."