Hello, Old Love

After Diane Messer's divorce, she couldn't shake the idea of calling Ken, her high-school boyfriend. It wasn't easy to find him. First, his name is Smith. Second, they'd known each other in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1970s, and tracking anyone down from that transient military world was nearly impossible. Besides, she says, "I'd heard that he was married and living in California—could he have picked a bigger state?" From her home in Connecticut, she found listings for hundreds of Kenneth Michael Smiths. Finally, using a website called military-brats.com, she was able to send him an e-mail. He called her immediately.

Turns out he was also divorced; like her, he had two sons. The two began an electronic courtship in November 2000; before long, they were chatting by phone every week. In January, they got up the nerve for a face-to-face visit. She flew in on a Friday, Ken proposed on Saturday. By June 2001, the two were married. Now 46, they live in Cottonwood, California. "Even back in high school, it was more than puppy love," she says. "We were so close—there was an intensity to us then, but also an innocence." On one level, she's still stunned to have had a second shot at first love. On another, it all makes perfect sense: "It's fate. We were meant to be together."

Thanks to the Internet, storybook romances like Ken and Diane's are becoming familiar tales. Experts call this trend "rekindling." While couples have always reconnected—by chance, the phone book, or detective work—the Internet has turned finding old flames into big business. But there's a definite downside. Many of those reaching out to an old love are married, as are many on the receiving end, and the Internet provides plenty of opportunities for destructive affairs.

Classmates.com, with 38 million users, is one of the most-trafficked sites on the Web, according to Nielsen//NetResearch. In a recent survey, 39 percent of its members—14.7 million people—said they had used the Internet to look up an old love. Another popular site, reunion.com, has 22 million members. Then there are alumni sites for individual schools. Nancy Kalish, a professor of psychology at California State University in Sacramento and author of Lost & Found Lovers: Facts and Fantasies of Rekindled Romances (Morrow, 1997), estimates that about 10 percent of people have tried to reunite with a lost love. And a New York Times poll found that 59 percent of Americans still think about their teenage sweetheart.

Another force driving the rekindling trend is divorce. Andrea Baker, associate professor of sociology at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, studies how couples interact online. After divorce, "people want new partners, but would rather take up with someone they know than a stranger," she says.

A good example is Donna Hanover, 54, journalist and ex-wife of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Hanover recently wed her high-school and college beau, and is writing a book about rekindlers called My Boyfriend's Back, due in January from Hudson Street Press. For her and husband Ed Oster, the trigger for reconnecting was a looming 30th college reunion. Hanover says she knew she and Oster were meant to be together within a few weeks: "You already have a history—I knew he was a person who kept his word."

Significant birthdays—especially a 50th—can also make us fire up the search engines. "Major life events all can play a role in this kind of longing," says Kate Wachs, Ph.D., a psychologist in Chicago and author of Dr. Kate's Love Secrets (Paper Chase Press, 2000). "Divorce, death of a spouse, and, perhaps most of all, children leaving home—all these things can make you feel like you need to get pieces of your past back."

Rooting through old address books is a healthy aspect of aging. "In our 20s, 30s, and 40s, we're too busy building a life to spend much time reminiscing," says Marcella Bakur Weiner, Ph.D., a psychologist in Brooklyn, New York, and coauthor of The Love Compatibility Book (New World Library, 2003). "But as we move toward our 50s and 60s, we begin to lose people around us—parents, even friends. So we start to look back."

Not all such reflection is conscious. Some reunions happen on a whim, or in Dawn Weeks's case, a dream. Unmarried, she liked her life in New York just fine. But one night, Dawn, now 46, dreamt about Mike, an old boyfriend she hadn't seen in more than two decades. "I can't explain it," she says, "but I woke up and felt like I just had to call him." She tracked down his office number in Annapolis, Maryland, and hung up in a panic when the receptionist answered. The next day, she managed to leave a message. "I wish I had a video of my face when I got it," laughs Mike Weeks, 49. "I just sort of froze, and then it was like a dream come true. I had been divorced for a few years, but hadn't really been dating. Dawn had always been the love of my life." They married six months later.

Some pairs of lost lovers reunite despite making every effort to stay apart. Curtis and Dorothy Blanchard first fell in love at Westinghouse High School on Chicago's West Side. On graduation day in 1975, Dorothy watched him walk across the stage, thinking, "He's walking out of my life."

And he did: he joined the Marines; she moved to Hawaii and married someone else. But soon, both were back in Chicago, both in difficult marriages. At their class's 20th reunion, Dorothy gave her number to a friend to pass on to Curtis. "We'd talk on the phone about what we were going through every four months or so," says Curtis, 47, "but we'd support each other. Each of us wanted the other to do well in the marriage, and we knew it would be wrong to see each other." Then times got really rough: Curtis's wife died, and Dorothy, 48, divorced. Before long, they got back together. "We are still on our honeymoon, four years later," Curtis says, "and we know how blessed we are. How many people find someone so wonderful even once in his or her life?"

'The minute I said "Hello," he knew exactly who it was, even though it had been decades. That's what I call a connection.'

Of course, there's no way of gauging how many of those couples who reunite actually make it to the altar. For the ones who do, the upside is obvious. These "second chance" couples often experience a profound level of closeness. How close? One Pennsylvania woman called her high-school love at 52, after finding a listing for him in Milwaukee. "The minute I said 'Hello,' he knew exactly who it was, even though it had been 30 years," she says. "That's what I call a connection."

That bond can lead to uncommonly sturdy marriages: after studying 1,001 such couples, Kalish found that 78 percent who reunited after at least five years of separation were together at the time of her survey, many after 20, 30, or even 40 years of marriage. (By contrast, many experts put the divorce rate for second marriages at around 60 percent.)

Experts aren't sure why these couples seem so happy. One theory, says psychologist Linda Waud, Psy.D., of Mountain View, California, is neurological: Waud studied three couples who had formed an intense bond between the ages of 15 and 17. She gauged the strength of their connections to each other and the intensity of their yearning while they were apart. Based on her findings, Waud speculates that, in the same way many creatures "imprint," or form an indelible bond with a caregiver, these young Romeos and Juliets may have actually rewired their neurological systems to form a permanent bond. "There is this strong sense that they have to reconnect with the other person before they die," Waud says. (Waud, 63, married her high-school sweetheart after their 35th reunion.)

This connection sometimes exists even for couples whose relationship the first time around was less than idyllic. Jeff and Terri Lindblad, both 51, dated at Peary High School in Rockville, Maryland, "until he dumped me for some blond," she laughs. She got over it and married soon after their 1971 graduation, but her life wasn't easy: her husband died in 1978; a second marriage ended in divorce; she lost her mother to breast cancer. A friend put her in touch with Jeff just as he was seeing his wife through terminal breast cancer.

"Those early months after my wife died were so hard—I was so full of grieving," Jeff says. Eventually, though, he was ready to reconnect with Terri. They e-mailed for a month before speaking by phone. "When we finally did talk, we would just giggle and laugh and scream," he recalls. And when they met, the first hug told them all they needed to know; they married in 2000. "Sometimes, we feel like my late wife and Terri's late mother conspired to get us together," he says. "We really had this sense that this was beyond our control, and that this marriage is our destiny."

But if the rekindling phenomenon makes for many happy endings, it also has an ugly side. Many revived relationships begin as extramarital affairs. Kalish says that 80 percent of the more than 1,000 rekindlers she has interviewed since the year 2000 became involved with their lost loves while still married. Even people who would never cheat with someone new can find the temptation of an old beau difficult to resist. "It's a cheating loophole," admits one woman who toyed with the idea after an e-mail from the blue. "It's as if he was covered by some kind of grandfathered adultery clause."

You might think that these reunion-affairs happen only in shaky marriages, but that's not always the case: in fact, half of the people in Kalish's research described themselves as happily married when they reconnected with a lost love. "These are good people who weren't looking for affairs," Kalish says.

'I know he still has feelings for her,' says one woman whose husband tried to reunite with an old flame. 'The pain is so great I can barely breathe.'

Try selling that "good people" line to someone who got dumped by one. Mary Lou, 59, lost her husband of 28 years when he rediscovered the girl he loved in eighth grade. "One day, he just came home and announced that she was his best friend, and off he went," she says. "He had always wanted me to stay home with the kids. When he left, he was making $100,000, and I was in my late 40s with no job experience." She eventually worked three jobs to make ends meet, and that wasn't the worst of it. It took years of therapy to restore her shattered confidence. "There were days when I couldn't get off the floor," she says.

Rekindlers acknowledge that their happiness can cause collateral damage. "It was really hard on our spouses," concedes Kathy Wilson, 52, now married to Mike Wilson, 54, her high-school love. (The couple live about an hour outside Houston, on a spread they've christened The Second Chance Ranch.) "Both of our spouses thought we were going through some kind of midlife crisis, and that we'd get over it."

The two met at high school in Seville, Spain. After breaking up, they both married and settled in California, where they would check in with each other from time to time. "Mike came to town for a business trip," she recalls. "I went to see him at his hotel, and he gave me this hug that, to this day, I just can't describe. It was a connection I just didn't have with anybody else," she says. They married in 1999. If it weren't for Mike, she says, "I would never have left my husband. I had no reason to."

Not every affair leads to marriage; indeed, most don't. According to the late infidelity researcher Shirley Glass, Ph.D., when one spouse leaves for another person, the chance of failure for the new relationship is about 75 percent.

One day while looking up a phone number on her computer, Carol, a college administrator in her mid-50s, typed her college sweetheart's name on a whim. "I didn't even know I'd been thinking of him," she says. Within weeks, they'd rendezvoused; within months, she had left her husband of 32 years and bought a condo in the city where her old flame lived. Immediately, the relationship deteriorated. "All of a sudden, he was too busy. The flowers stopped, the candy stopped," she says. "We tried to make it work for a few years, but it eventually ended in a very ugly way. I was foolish—I saw what I wanted to see." While Carol admits having her dreams shattered has been humbling, she sees an upside: "I needed to try it," she says. She and her husband never divorced, and they are working toward reconciliation. "Obviously, we both know we have a lot of work to do to overcome this," she says. "But we are inching in the right direction."

Repairing trust in a marriage is hard enough after a fling. But bouncing back from a lost-love affair is far more complicated. "My husband has begged me to stay," a victim of rekindling wrote on an Internet message board, after her spouse's attempt to reconnect with a lost love failed. "I know that he still has feelings for her," she says. "The pain is so great sometimes I can barely breathe." Many couples are unable to rebuild the relationship without professional help. The solution is as individual as the two people involved, but a good marriage counselor should be able to help find it. One starting point is the therapist locator on the website of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. Family doctors and clergy can also give referrals.

Knowing what we do about this growing trend, how worried should married folks be that their spouse is going to leave them for their first love? The answer: not very. For most people, a blast from the past won't result in either a divorce or a fairy-tale wedding. "I traded a few e-mails with my old boyfriend," one divorced woman admits. "Not only was he married, but he turned out to still have the same traits I always hated. In just two e-mails, he managed to get in little digs about where I live and the career I had chosen. It was nice to remember why I broke up with the jerk."

If an old flame has contacted your spouse, experts say your best bet is to simply relax: the more paranoid you seem, advises Kate Wachs, Ph.D., a psychologist in Chicago, the more difficult it becomes for your spouse to broach the subject.

And if you're the one thinking of making contact, it may be hard to resist the temptation of jotting a quick e-mail message. But think long and hard before you click Send. You might be better off living with your high-school fantasy than coming face to face with the present-day reality. "Most of the time," says David Greenfield, Ph.D., a psychologist in Connecticut, "if we were meant to be in each other's lives, we would be. In most cases, these relationships are over for a good reason."

Sarah Mahoney lives in Durham, Maine, and is a contributing editor at More and Parents. Her story on dating after 50 appeared in the November-December 2003 issue.

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