Looking for Love in Long-Ago Places

A psychologist studying lovers who have found each other after years of separation says their tales of lost love are surprisingly common.

“I’ll go into a class of 100 people and ask how many have done this and I get about 10,” Nancy Kalish said.

“As I go through life, I get the hairdressers, the dog groomer, I just talk about it everywhere,” she said. On a recent flight from California to New York, “I got the stewardess and the person next to me.”

“That’s one of the surprising things to me--it really is common,” she said. “It’s just another way we look for love.”

Kalish, a psychology professor at Cal State Sacramento, has collected questionnaires from about 600 people who spent at least five years apart from former lovers and then reconnected for another try.

Among her findings from the first 500 questionnaires:

* For about half her sample, the initial relationship happened at age 17 or younger. “These are the puppy loves that people make fun of. . . . And yet, when they have a choice to go back to someone, of all the relationships in their life, that’s the one they go back to.”

* The lovers usually were broken apart the first time by parental disapproval or moving away.

* Reunion happened from ages 18 to 89, though most often from age 30 and up. Sixty percent of her sample stayed together after the reunion, sometimes through an extramarital affair.

* When people reunited with their first loves after 25 years or so, there was a 75% chance of staying together. Those who married reported “ecstatic marriages where they say to me, ‘After 22 years, people think we’re newlyweds,’ that they’re soul mates. There’s kind of a spiritual connection they feel with these people, like God brought them back together.”

* “The sex is great . . . [because the relationship] is so comfortable and familiar and it’s just wonderful getting that person back. . . . It’s an appeal to us to right the wrong done from years ago.”

* Only 2% reconnected at a school reunion. Much more common was an active search for the lost lover. It usually was the “dumped” partner, and usually the man, who went looking to reconnect. And the message in the initial letter or phone call was usually an innocent, “Hi, just wondering how your life has been going.”

* The reuniting often packed more emotional power than either partner expected, and often led to extramarital affairs. A single woman calls an old lover, for example, “and he says, ‘Great, I want you to meet my wife.’ The three of them go out to dinner, and it’s aboveboard, and all of a sudden sparks start to fly over the table.”

So, Kalish warns, if an old lover calls out of the blue and suggests a get-together, and “if you’re in a marriage that you value, consider what you’re doing.”

Kalish is still looking for people to participate in her study. She can be contacted at the Lost Love Project, P.O. Box 19692, Sacramento, CA 95819.