Reunited … feels so good: past loves
Published: June 19, 2005
How many times have you wondered about your childhood sweetheart?
That first fizzy, dizzy kiss? Those after-homework phone conversations that lasted for hours?
If you’re like 59 percent of Americans polled by Classmates.com this year, memories of that first romance have floated through your mind at least once in the last year.
Reminiscing, of course, is hardly a new phenomenon. Class reunions and homecoming celebrations have drawn crowds for decades. Former sweethearts have run into one another, flirted, and even struck up relationships for ages.
But recently the number of single, divorced, widowed and unhappily married people turning back the clock to find true love has skyrocketed, thanks to a convergence of middle age and technology.
“These days, there are lots of single baby boomers looking back for all sorts of reasons, and the Internet is expediting that trend,” said Donna Hanover, ex-wife of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and author of My Boyfriend’s Back: True Stories of Rediscovering Love With a Long-Lost Sweetheart.
In the book, Hanover explains that shortly after her divorce from Giuliani in 2002, she received a call from her former high school boyfriend, who had become a lawyer and was living in California.
“Ed Oster was my high school love. He was also my college love - until he broke my heart,” she writes. “The sound of his voice brought back memories of our young romance. Ed wasn’t a cad in college. In fact, he was tender and dear. But he was 17 and just didn’t want to go steady. I didn’t take that news so well at the time, but here we were 30 years later… . Coffee was sounding better and better.”
He said he’d be in New York on business. They met for a drink, then a walk in Central Park. They started dating, and quickly fell back in love. In March 2003, they got married.
“As soon as our story became public,” Hanover said in a telephone interview from her home in Manhattan, “I started hearing about long-lost loves from all sorts of people. So I decided to write a book.”
She also created a Web site where she has collected similar stories from more than 600 couples.
One of them is Janice and Irv Singer of Blue Bell, Montgomery County.
“We were friends all through junior high and high school,” said Janice, who graduated from Lower Merion High School in 1981 in the same class as Irv.
“He really helped me in trigonometry,” she said. “I would have failed without him.” At the time, they enjoyed each other’s company. But Janice had a steady boyfriend, and Irv had a steady girlfriend, and neither had the nerve to cross the line.
After graduation, they moved on.
Then, in 1986, they met again at their five-year reunion. But this time Janice was a newlywed. Irv moved to Arizona, had a girlfriend, and eventually came back to Pennsylvania, unattached.
By the time their 10-year high school reunion rolled around, Janice was divorced, which made them both available.
“He walked me to my car and we kissed. Then, he called me the next day and we went out. It was fantastic,” she recalled. “That was in November. In January he moved in with me, and in April he proposed.”
Twelve years later the Singers, now 42, are still married and are the parents of three children.
That does not surprise Nancy Kalish.
A professor of psychology at California State University Sacramento, she has been researching erstwhile affairs for 12 years and is the author of Lost and Found Lovers: Facts and Fantasies of Rekindled Romances.
“More of these relationships work than not,” Kalish said. “The stay-together rate I discovered is 72 to 78 percent.” That is much higher than the rate found by the U.S. Census Bureau for second marriages in general - only 40 percent lasted more than five years.
In most cases, Kalish said, teenage love affairs are interrupted by circumstances: disapproving parents, a distant college, military service, or relocation of the family. And that’s why they have a good chance of working the second time around, she said. For adults, the roadblocks are gone.
“But people who broke up for other reasons, maybe they weren’t getting along, or maybe there was emotional or physical abuse, aren’t going to be interested in reuniting,” Kalish said. “And they shouldn’t.”
For those who had a positive experience in adolescence, rekindled love is particularly potent.
“There’s brain research that indicates that those raging hormones imprint a lifelong emotional memory. You basically defined what love is together,” Kalish said. “It’s in the primitive, unconscious brain. I describe it as the key in the lock. It is a powerful connection.”
So powerful that, Kalish warns, innocent reunions can often turn into dangerous liaisons.
About 80 percent of the 1,030 people Kalish studied said they reunited with a former love while one of them was still married.
“They are almost all affairs,” she said, adding that the number of strayers has more than doubled since the Internet has emerged as a popular way to search for old flames.
“Most don’t meet up with the person and ditch their marriage. They think about it for a few years. They agonize,” she said.
Bonita and Waldon Hill of Northampton, Pa., near Bethlehem, know about the anguish and bliss of a rediscovered romance.
They didn’t date as teenagers, but they were friends from their days at P.S. 52 elementary in Queens, N.Y., until high school graduation.
“We eyed one another for years,” said Bonita, now 50. “But my parents were extremely religious people and they did not allow me to associate with people outside our religion.”
In the park, away from her parents, Bonita would watch Waldon, now 51, play baseball with her brother. And in school he would find her in the hallway and strike up brief conversations.
“I loved this kid,” Bonita recalled. “He was four inches shorter than me. He was considered a nerd. I was this tall gawky girl, and I just adored him.”
After graduation, Bonita said, she married “to get away from my parents.” She was 19. Waldon went to college in Brooklyn. Their separate lives began.
“We didn’t see each other again for a long, long time,” Bonita said. “My marriage lasted until I was 26. I had four sons, and I stayed on my own.”
Waldon married twice and became the father of three.
“His second marriage ended with me,” Bonita said.
Waldon said he was already unhappy and considering divorce when he logged onto Classmates.com in November 2001 and typed in Bonita’s name.
“His e-mail was two sentences,” she recalled. ” ‘How are you? How has life treated you?’ ”
Bonita answered with simple facts - she was divorced and working in Manhattan.
“In the second message, though, I told him I’d always had a terrible crush on him, and that started everything,” she said.
They spoke on the phone. They agreed to meet.
“It was a painful, tumultuous time,” Bonita said. “I didn’t want to be responsible for breaking up a marriage. We went back and forth on what we should do. We e-mailed incessantly.”
Six months later, they got caught.
“His wife pretended to be him on an e-mail,” Bonita said. “I was declaring my love, so it was out. It was horrendous.”
Waldon filed for divorce, and in May 2003 he and Bonita held their marriage ceremony at P.S. 52, with the school band playing the wedding march.
And it all started by dropping a few words into cyberspace.
The Internet offers myriad ways to catch up with old friends. There are general search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and there are also a growing number of Web sites devoted entirely to people-finding.
Classmates.com, with 60 million registered participants, is the most-visited site, according to Internet consumer research firm comScore Media Metrix.
“It’s not a dating site,” stressed John Uppendahl, vice president of public relations. “It’s about reconnecting with old friends, period.”
Still, it’s no secret that romances have sprouted on the site.
“It’s definitely a trend,” Uppendahl said. “We get letters all the time from couples who reunited and got married. We don’t keep statistics on it, though. It’s a privacy issue. We don’t read people’s e-mails.”
Most of the couples chronicled in Hanover’s book are middle-aged, but the practice is just as attractive to younger people.
Trina Kraus, 27, and her husband, John, 29, are together today because of the Internet.
They dated in 10th grade in upstate New York, until she traveled to Spain for the summer, and he found another girlfriend. After graduation, John enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Haiti. Trina went to Houghton College in New York.
“We’d write and say we’d be together when he got back. He came to visit me in college, but things just didn’t work out,” she said.
Trina got her degree and became an English teacher at Olney High School. John stayed in the Army.
In November 2003, Trina had just broken up with a longtime boyfriend and decided to use Classmates.com to find John.
“I was 26, he was 28, I figured he’d be married and he probably had kids,” she said.
He wasn’t, and he didn’t.
“He was in Georgia, at Fort Benning, and he was coming home to Buffalo for Christmas,” Trina said. “My parents had moved to Pennsylvania, but I had a girlfriend who lived about an hour away. So I drove up to meet him for dinner.”
She stayed for nine days.
“It was like no time had passed at all,” she said. “By the end of the visit we even talked about getting engaged because in the summer he was going to be sent to Iraq.”
Trina drove back to Philly. John was transferred to Washington state, where he learned he was going to Iraq in February instead of July.
On Jan. 24, 2004, they eloped. The bride wore a pink sweater and khaki slacks. The groom wore cargo pants and a pullover.
Since then, Trina has moved to Seattle. John has returned from overseas, and the couple plan to hold a church wedding in August in Harleysville, Montgomery County.
Both Hanover and Kalish agree that reuniting with long-lost lovers can be a terrific thing, and computer technology is making it more commonplace.
But, Kalish cautions, people should not flirt with rediscovered love unless they are ready to deal with unresolved emotions.
“An e-mail seems innocent enough,” she said. “But you need to be careful because the third and fourth e-mails start getting emotional. The primitive brain takes over and it steamrolls over you… . I’m very enthusiastic about this for single or widowed people. But those who are married need to be careful. There are many sides to this. Some are wonderful, and some aren’t.”
A coupling, a parting, then at long last love
Amy and Jim Ellixson got married in April - 20 years after they first met.
It all started at a skating rink, when Jim was just 16 and Amy a year younger.
“My friend Dana knew him. She said wait until you meet this guy, so I went one weekend and she introduced us,” Amy recalled.
It was instant like.
“He when to Sun Valley High School [in Aston, Delaware County] and I went to Cardinal O’Hara [in Springfield, Delaware County],” Amy said.
Pretty soon she was attending his football and baseball games at Sun Valley, wearing his letter jacket. He was taking her to several proms, including hers at Cardinal O’Hara High School.
It was typical teenage love. Then came graduation.
“He went to Point Park University in Pittsburgh, and I went to Drexel,” Amy said. “We kept in touch, but we were doing our own things.”
Amy married someone else in 1996 and moved to Texas.
Jim moved to Florida, found a girlfriend, and they had a child.
Amy’s marriage didn’t last. Jim’s relationship fell apart, too. And through it all, they kept in touch through e-mail and occasional telephone calls.
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My Boyfriend’s Back“He was someone I could talk to,” Amy said. “Someone who would listen. He never tried to tell me what to do.”
Jim moved back to Pennsylvania, and when Amy was single again, he asked her out.
“He had feelings, but he waited until I was free,” she said. “He’s such a great guy.”
It got serious in 2003, and both their families were thrilled.
At the wedding, Jim’s brother gave a toast that ended with the guests raising their glasses and saying: “Finally!”
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