In the Face of Fear, Old Flames Reach Out to Each Other

On Sept. 12, old love came calling for Melanie Robinson-Crew. “My ex-fiance called me to say he wanted to make sure I was OK and my family in New York was OK,” said Robinson-Crew, a 22-year-old Santa Monica Community College student who was crushed when he abruptly broke off their relationship nearly two years ago. “The next couple of times we talked by phone, it was catching up on what was happening in our lives. Then in one of our conversations, he just broke down crying. He said, ‘You are going to have this great life and I know I am not going to be a part of it.”’

Since those initial conversations, said Robinson-Crew, who is pragmatic about love, the two have talked regularly, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning (one recent conversation lasted four hours).

Her ex-fiance, who is also 22 and lives in New Orleans, has decided to quit his job and move to Los Angeles, making it clear he harbors hope that Robinson-Crew will become his main squeeze again, and this time, maybe for good.

Robinson-Crew’s experience is hardly anomalous. The tragic events have rendered emotions raw and accessible, prompting some people to seek out old loves. The attacks have created “an existential crisis which clearly shows our fragility, mortality and how things can change in an instant,” said Shirley Glass, a clinical psychologist in the Baltimore area. Such a crisis can spur people to re-examine relationships past and present.

Reaching back to a past love may be a reassessment of “disposable relationships” that maybe aren’t so disposable, or an attempt at gaining comfort. Reconnecting could be an effort to apologize for inflicting wounds or an attempt to overcome isolation while coping with the trauma of the attacks.

“The whole thing is so horrific that if somebody is not in a loving relationship they will reach back and touch someone to whom they were connected,” explained Glass. “People are looking for undisturbed safety zones.” Checking in with old friends or flames, she said, “is sort of like tucking your children into bed and making sure everything is where it should be.”

The night of Sept. 11, Kevin Barrett, a 42-year-old attorney and actor who lived near the World Trade Center, got a message on his cell phone answering service. “This woman I had dated in San Francisco on and off more than three years ago left me a message that night,” said Barrett, who caught a train to Boston the day of the attacks. “She said she was terribly worried and she asked me to please call her back. I talked to her the next day and she told me she was very concerned because she was trying to get ahold of me and couldn’t get through, which she thought was a very bad sign. I was very touched. It was very comforting to hear her voice.”

The woman now lives with her boyfriend, but talking to her reminded Barrett that she was someone he truly liked.

It had been a year since a 36-year-old Venice marketing executive had seen her ex-boyfriend of six years when he called on Sept. 11, as the attacks unfolded on television. The woman, who asked to be anonymous because she is in a relationship, often traveled to New York on business. “He called to say he was concerned because he thought I was in New York,” she said. “We ended up talking for about an hour. It got us back together on the phone for about a month during which we had happy thoughts about one another. He kept saying we shared a really good thing. I finally told him I was in a relationship that I did not want to ruin.”

A38-year-old West Los Angeles writer has maintained a friendship with a man she briefly dated before she married someone else more than decade ago. The attacks functioned as a sort of truth serum for the man, who urgently pressed the woman to meet him after Sept. 11. “He told me at lunch that he had reassessed his life and that it had become clear to him that he needed to come clean with his feelings about me,” said the woman, who surmised his being single during the attacks probably spurred him to reach out. “He declared his love to me. It was interesting and touching.”

She told her old lover she was flattered but made it clear she would do nothing to fracture her marriage. But a happy marriage isn’t impervious to the seductive pull of old flames.

Cal State Sacramento psychology professor Nancy Kalish, who has studied the phenomenon of “lost and found” love, said she knew of a married woman who got so caught up in the emotions of reconnecting with an old lover after the terror attacks that she arranged to meet him secretly. And then, said Kalish, a day after she met up with her former lover, her husband found an incriminating e-mail.

“He threatened to leave, she cried and got him to stay,” said Kalish. The couple has decided to attend marriage counseling, but the woman feels she has hurt her lost love and her husband. The woman’s story unfolded in a message board on Kalish’s Web site https://www.lostlovers.com.

“I have always warned people about this,” said Kalish, who also has a message board especially for people who have reconnected after Sept. 11. “You can’t just say hello after thinking about a person for so many years. It becomes an obsession for some people.”

Barry McCarthy, a psychology professor at American University in Washington, D.C., said that there is benign reaching out--to make sure someone is OK, and risky reaching out. When people are “destabilized by a traumatic event, it can lead to what might be called foxhole relationships, unions forged in times of crisis.”

“People become anxious, desperate and panicky,” said McCarthy. “They reach out to someone they probably should not reach out for....”

As for Robinson-Crew, she is still stunned and perplexed by her ex-fiance’s sudden, fierce drive to be in Los Angeles. “I don’t know what is going on with him,” she said. “It is like someone hit him in the head. I told him, ‘If you want to move out here and start all over again, I’ll do that. But nothing is going to happen between us unless he grows up.”

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Birds & Bees, a column about sexuality and relationships, runs Mondays. E-mail: kathykelleher@home.com.