The person you remember may have spent years becoming someone your memory has never met.

Memory holds people still. Someone you have not seen for years exists in your mind as they were, while the actual person has spent that time changing, losing things, learning things, becoming someone your version has never encountered. Meeting them again can feel like a substitution, when in fact your copy simply stopped updating.

Before you see someone after a long gap, remind yourself that you are meeting a stranger with a shared past. Ask about now rather than testing whether then still holds. And extend the same allowance to yourself, since their copy of you is equally out of date.