[Classmates.com, Reunion.com and then Facebook gave people a way to
make contact without anyone else knowing that they’d reached out. It became
normal to contact old friends, so why not a teen sweetheart?]
Technology has reshaped our
love life. We now search for potential romantic partners on dating
apps, sext and cheat on Ashley Madison. We can even contact a lost
love more easily — and without anyone knowing. But just as we should be
cautious when reaching out to strangers on dating apps, contacting a lost
love should never be taken lightly.
The author, a psychologist and the author of "Lost & Found Lovers: Facts and Fantasies of
Rekindled Romances," says reconnecting with your lost love is probably a bad idea.
(Tom LeGro/TheWashington Post)
For more than two decades, I’ve
been researching rekindled romances, usually adults reunited with loves from
their adolescent years. Over the years, I’ve surveyed more than 4,000
couples worldwide.(Tom LeGro/The
The profile of a couple
whose reunion was successful —comparing 1,500 survey
participants in the 1990s to 1,600 additional survey participants
over the past decade — hasn’t changed. During the initial romance,
successful rekindlers had been 22 or younger and grown up in the same home
town, dated longer than a year, and were separated by situational factors, such
as parental disapproval, moving away, being too young or leaving for the
military.
What has changed, though, is
whether those romances last. When I began studying love reunions in 1994, I
found that 72 percent of the participants remained together with their lost
love. By 2006, only 49 percent were still together a decade later. What
happened?
In the 1990s, contacting a lost
love often involved getting a phone number or address from the lost love’s
parents, old friends or other relatives. These contacts acted like gatekeepers:
If you went to your lost love’s father for the phone number, you’d better be
single. These men and women were purposefully pursuing a romantic
reconnection.
Classmates.com, Reunion.com and then Facebook gave people a way to
make contact without anyone else knowing that they’d reached out. It became
normal to contact old friends, so why not a teen sweetheart?
As a result, people whose
young loves were interrupted reached out, even when they were
married. Sixty-two percent of my 1,600 survey participants in 2006 were
married at the time they reconnected with a lost love. Half said
they’d been “happily married,” so they saw no harm initially in saying
hello. In fact, some told their spouses beforehand.
But there is a harm. Lost love reunions are a different kind of romance, often
the most intense of my subjects’ lives. This is in part because of the
excitement of the affair, but also because these were romances that never
ended; a situation broke them apart when they were young, and they wondered
what might have been. Now they wanted the opportunity to find out if they
belonged together. And because they are in the same town, the shared roots had
formed a bond of familiarity, comfort and trust. As a
result, these extramarital reunions can become obsessive and then
leap off the computer into a physical affair.
But only for a time. Just 5
percent of the lost love affair partners in my research surveys left their
spouses and married each other. The affairs usually ended bitterly, when one
person wanted to leave the marriage but the other wouldn’t. One woman moved to
the city of her lost love and stalked him after he recommitted to his marriage
and left her; he filed a restraining order. Another was so bitter when her lost
love left her that she called his wife to report the affair, ending his
marriage. One man came home from grocery shopping and overheard his wife
on the phone, using endearments she had always used for him.
Another change that social
media has wrought is that the population of rekindlers — yes, and those who
have affairs — is getting younger. There was an age range of 18 to 95 for my
participants in the 1990s, but the average reunion happened in the 40s and
older. I still have that age range, but the average age of my participants has
dropped into the early to mid-30s. They leave their marriages more often than
older affair rekindlers, and they often have young children at home.
Social media doesn’t cause
cheating. Facebook doesn’t book the hotel room. But it does make the initial
contact simple, the secrecy easier and the start of it all seem harmless.
* The author is an emeritus
professor of psychology at California State University Sacramento
