That’s probably because there were few affairs. People back then had to write personal letters or make phone calls to contact their lost loves, and those who reconnected did so purposefully, usually to spark a romance, and they were single, divorced or widowed. They met for a reunion, and they continued or ended it. There were no times out or No Contact.

But this NC pattern (as my website members have labeled it) has become common for people who post on my member forums. The members’ reunions are usually affairs.

No Contact is not my term or idea. I know it doesn’t work. Agree to a 1 month time out and that may last about 2 weeks. An open-ended NC may end even sooner. I have some thoughts for you about the negative impact of “going NC.”

NC is a middle ground. No one has decided to leave the romance, but there’s a feeling that it isn’t working, because there are marriages involved. It’s meant to be a brief time out to catch one’s breath and get one’s life back.

I have spoken in the forums about lost love reunions having an addictive quality. They certainly are obsessive. Part of what causes this state of emotions is “going NC.” This interim, time out period sets up an insecure attachment, a withdrawal from the love partner. Anxiety builds up, wondering if the bond has been really severed by the lack of contact.

As the anxiety builds, it becomes intolerable. Then in haste, in fear and panic, the lost love is contacted. Reassurances are given, the voice is comforting, and the anxiety immediately goes away. Ending NC ends the anxiety that it caused in the first place, so the insecure, addictive lost love romance is reinforced.

But the joy is not consistent or secure, because the lost loves will pull the plug on the romance every now and then, without warning, to try to figure out what to do with the marriages or take time “to think” (or to go to couples therapy with their spouses). 

If you go to Las Vegas or Atlantic City and play slot machines, the machine doesn’t pay off every time. It pays off approximately every 35th time. If it paid off every 35th time exactly, no one would want to play – everyone would want to be only the 35th player. The payoff at approximately every 35th time keeps people playing.

If you don’t win this time, well, maybe next time; and the more you lose, the more you have to keep playing, because your time to win must be coming right up. This is intermittent reinforcement. It is the most powerful motivator there is. That’s why there are gambling addictions. Just keep playing long enough and you have to win, right? Meanwhile, before the payoff, you are losing, big time.

Setting up “NC” is a recipe for misery. It doesn’t allow the romance to move forward, so it stops whatever happiness was going on. Instead, it substitutes a very painful insecurity and anxiety, too painful to continue. Two weeks of misery during a self-imposed NC, and then a few moments of feeling happy. Just like the gambler — losing more than winning, but waiting for and needing the hit.

Breaking the silence and reconnecting momentarily eases the fear of losing the romance, but it sets up an insecure attachment that makes people more clingy and more addicted. It is harder to leave a lost love affair after going back and forth from Contact to NC to Contact to NC… The relief every time a NC ends sets up the belief that “this is it,” now it will work. But it doesn’t, because the same issues that caused the lost loves to go NC are still there – they are married.

And it certainly doesn’t help the marriage in any way. If one knows that the NC is time-limited, then the affair is still there. An affair without sex at the moment is still an affair. No one in NC can work on the marriage, decide what to do about the marriage, go into therapy to see if he/she can save the marriage. And a person is just as likely to get caught by the spouse in the NC period as when they were seeing each other: the person is acting so weird that the spouse gets suspicious that something is wrong, perhaps cheating. 

So testing a marriage vs, a lost love affair, to see which is more important, by setting up a withdrawal from the affair partner (which increases longing) will skew towards the affair every time, and this has nothing to do with whether the marriage or lost love relationship is “better.” Ask a cocaine addict to choose between his/her family or the drug, and the addict will pick the cocaine every time. Does this mean the cocaine is better for him/her than the family? Of course not.

When someone decides to (or has to) give up a lost love, if the reunited couple had had a series of NC times, leaving will be much harder than if the romance just progressed until it ended. Returning to the lost love has been strongly reinforced — because the return always took away the unbearable anxiety. NC/C became a cycle of familiarity; trying to break the cycle and really stop the romance is excruciating. So back we go: the romance doesn’t end, the anxiety briefly clears, and it is reinforced again… and strengthened each time the lost loves try to leave but “slip.”

Cold Turkey, one day at a time. That works. But the person has to make a very firm decision that this is truly the end and then grieve the permanent loss. 

As the researcher of rekindled romances – couples who loved each other years ago, parted, then reunited years later – I have been asked repeatedly about Facebook; it appears that marriages are breaking apart because lost loves find each other on social networking sites, cheat on their spouses, and suddenly take off with their rediscovered high school sweethearts. If only we didn’t have Facebook, we would have safe marriages!

Is that true? Can an inanimate medium cause someone to betray their husband or wife? Does Facebook guide your fingers to click until you find your ex-boyfriend or ex- girlfriend, without your knowledge or permission?  What blame does technology bear for bringing people back together who shouldn’t be back together?

I have been working with reunited couples for 16 years. Yes, the population seems to have changed. According to my research participants in several phases of my study, there are more extramarital affairs in this population now than in the 1990’s, before the Web, search engines, classmates sites, and now social networking were invented. In the 1990’s, people who looked up lost loves did so very purposefully.

People were easy to find – it is a myth that only the Internet has brought long lost loves back together – but to contact that old flame, it was necessary to make human contact: perhaps asking a friend or relative of the lost love for his/her phone number and then calling the lost love at home. It was a rare married man who had the audacity to go to an elder parent to ask for the daughter’s phone number, and then call his lost love at home, not knowing if an irritated spouse would answer the phone. And the act of making that inquiry or phone call was clearly a romantic overture, and the searcher knew it. No rationalizations there.

So what has changed with the Internet is how casual, even accidental, it can be nowadays to see a photo of lost love, or even a name, and have all the memories come flooding back. The old flame is right there, ready for contact, and what could be the harm? People who are happily married, especially, do not realize the risk they are taking, the Pandora’s box they are opening, just to say hello. But this began long before Facebook. A lost love could be found through Google, web sites like Classmates.com, or people finder sites like Zabasearch.com. Facebook is simply the newest medium to blame.

Facebook is not the cause of marriages breaking apart. Facebook does not book hotel rooms. What I have noticed, however, is that extramarital Facebook reunions have begun by younger people. The older websites like Classmates.com had, well, older members. Facebook began with a younger membership; they are no more apt to cheat than people who find lost loves on other websites, but because they were younger on Facebook, young families have often been involved instead of empty nesters.

No doubt about it, though: cheating is enabled with “new and improved” technology in general. No need to write letters anymore. Remember how long they used to take to arrive? It was hard to stay obsessive during those long intervals. And you had to make sure to beat your spouse to the mailbox. A computer takes care of all that: fast replies and secret email accounts so the spouse never sees the mail. Much cheaper than a secret post office box, too, and the affair partners can communicate at any hour, right from home.

Smart phones can be used for dumb purposes; a married person who wants to contact a lost love can send email or text messages on the go. Or send digital photos from the last rendezvous… then delete them. The evidence is gone.

Cheap cell phones can be purchased that spouses never know about. Only the affair partner has the number. Instant Messaging! Chat rooms! Enough said.

Internet shopping allows for sending gifts from your computer right to the affair partner’s business address. Use a secret credit card or Paypal account and a spouse will never know.

Want to end the affair? Send an email to say it’s over, then delete your email account and throw away the cheap secret phone. Done!

This is the cavalier way I hear technology discussed by people in lost love affairs. They are thrilled that secrecy is so easy. But you know what? Most people get caught. Men and women who had been in a kind of teenage denial suddenly lose their marriages and then wonder what hit them. If the marriage partner is very forgiving, the marriage may stay together. But so much harm has been done.

Technology cannot cause affairs. But the razzle dazzle of new technology can obscure the old fashioned devastation that occurs to the lost loves, to their spouses, to their children, to their extended families and friends, to their business contacts, and to their community support systems. Lost love reunions between single, divorced, or widowed men and women can be very happy; but if people are not truly free to reunite, everybody loses. Seeing the wake of these affairs, over and over, makes this objective researcher sad.

Some individuals reported “returning” to people they considered lost loves from when they were 8, 9, or 10 years old. Participants older than 65, especially, reunited with these “puppy loves.” These reunions had the same high success rate as reunions of lost loves from high school or college.

The reunited couple grew up in the same community during their formative years, went to school together, shared a peer group, and were often close to their first love’s family. Descriptions of the rekindled romances invariably included “comfortable” and “familiar.” Lack of sexual involvement when these couples were teens neither increased nor diminished the adult couples’ success in the reunion.

Successful senior reunions
Thirty-seven percent of the participants were in their 40s and 50s when they reunited with their lost loves, 10 percent reconnected between the ages of sixty to seventy, and 4 percent were in their 80s or 90s. Longevity, of course, is a factor in the decreasing percentages with age.

Although the number of reunions decreased with age, the success of these reunions increased. In their written comments on the questionnaire, seniors attributed their success to their maturity: improved communication skills, a new-found ability not to “sweat the small stuff,” and knowing exactly how they wanted to spend their later years. They also commented that they lacked tolerance for arguments, so they avoided arguing. These factors have also been reported in research on relationships of seniors with their spouses and their old friends.

The couples’ love had endured through their many years apart and, in the case of widows and widowers, often through very happy intervening marriages. These older reunited couples were more spiritually inclined than the younger participants in the study. They often believed they were soul mates and that a Higher Power brought them back together. One man in his 70s wrote: Where we end up after death, only God knows. But we will surely be together.

Risks & stumbling blocks
The high success rate for rekindled romances suggests that older adults who are lonely or reluctant to date strangers should consider pursuing an old flame. However, seniors should be warned that there are risks and stumbling blocks.

By 2005, two-thirds of my new survey participants were in extramarital affairs. Seniors were no exception. Most of the extramarital affairs started with innocent email exchanges; usually the adults who initiated the correspondence were divorced or widowed but found that their lost loves were married. Neither of them planned to become involved in an affair, but the correspondence escalated quickly: email led to phone calls, and the vocal reconnection led to a face to face meeting, which usually began an affair.

Because they were brought up in an era when premarital and extramarital sex was especially stigmatized, members of the World War II generation who were involved in affairs expressed shame and guilt to a greater extent than younger participants.

Affair or not, their adult children often disapproved. When parents were widowed, their children saw the old flames as interlopers. This is true in many second marriages, but rekindled romances bring special concerns: the old flame preceded the other parent. Even middle-aged children felt uncomfortable with that, as if the parent were telling them, “This is the person I should have married.” In fact, some parents said this directly to their children, leaving them to wonder, “So then, I shouldn’t have been born?”

In addition, the middle-aged children were often protective. Many believed that the lost loves came back to their parents just to take their money. And they worried that their parents could not know this person anymore: after all, 50 years may have passed. Some adult children expressed being worried that a reunion was an indicator that their parents were senile, or at the very least, chasing a fantasy.

To make matters worse, these romances proceeded very rapidly. Elder lost loves feel they have wasted too many years without each other, that they have little time left in life, and they do not want to wait. They married within months — or days — of reuniting. No wonder their middle-aged children were worried.

Rekindled romances have a different history and a different pace, they follow different rules and have better outcomes, than average romances. These are loves that were interrupted. For my oldest couple, the interruption lasted 75 years, and the happy marriage began on her 95th birthday.

Like their friends and family, their psychologists insisted that rekindled romances were mere “fantasies” and recommended that they “move on.” If the lost love reunion involves infidelity, the client was often advised to “find what is wrong in your marriage, because that is what you imagined having with your lost love.” This advice is not helpful to lost love clients, who do not want their reality denied or their feelings belittled. Very few of these men and women challenged their therapists, however; they simply never returned.

The advisability and outcomes of the extramarital affairs aside, my research indicates that love for old flames, even those who were separated for decades, is very real, and reunions can be long-lasting. For the last few years, I have focused on how best to educate psychotherapists about this different kind of romance, and I have sought to understand why ordinary people and so many mental health experts doubt the veracity and strength of lost love bonds.

One reason for this doubt, indicated in results from my “First Love” survey, is that many adults had terrible first love experiences; they have no desire to reunite with these people from the past, and cannot understand why anyone would want to do such a thing.

Another reason for skepticism might be if popular culture images of love reunions  stereotype people who try reunions are just chasing rainbows. Could films in particular influence how people evaluate the wisdom of looking up lost loves? What I discovered was intriguing: Hollywood scripts are more pessimistic in outcome than real-life rekindled romances.

My website Member Forums members (Lostlovers.com) and I compiled a list of 120 films with lost love reunions in their plots. The oldest was released in 1939 and the newest came out in 2006. I found that a statistically significant number of these reunion movies ended with the lost loves still together: 102 of 120. But what fascinated me was that most of these reunion films involved unusual characters or situations that could not possibly occur in real life: they were fantasies, science fiction, thrillers, or musicals.

Of the 102 films with reunion happy endings, 43 were comedies, light-hearted movies, and “chick flicks.” These movies had contrived plots and characters with distinctive personalities, like Bridget Jones’s Diary and For the Boys. These were not ordinary rekindled romance couples. The remaining 59 films with lost love reunions ending happily were science fiction movies, such as Solaris and Somewhere in Time; fantasies such as Family Man, Forrest Gump, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Illusionist; and light-hearted musicals such as Gigi and A Little Night Music.

So these 102 films with successful rekindled romances, out of the 120 reunion films I looked at, were improbable lost love fantasies — just as therapists had stereotyped their clients’ reunions.

The 18 movies that concluded with reunion breakups included Splendor in the Grass, Casablanca, The Way We Were, and Miss Saigon. With the exception of Cast Away, the films that end with the couples separating again are primarily serious dramas; their plots are complicated and more plausible than the happy-ending reunion movies, and they include lots of heartbreak. Surely there are movies we missed, but those we remembered and included were clearly biased.

Lost lovers question their own hearts and sanity as everyone around them scoffs at their reunions. They seem like lost love film characters who separate at the conclusion of the movie — men and women struggling with lost love issues, obsessed, and conflicted. No wonder therapists might think that real-life reunions as a whole are toxic to adults and inevitably end badly.

Real rekindled romances (provided the lost loves are single, widowed or divorced) have happier outcomes for the couples than reel endings. And even for those who separate again, their love was real, not fantasy.

Muhammed Ali / Lonnie Williams
Loni Anderson/ Bob Flick
Ehud Barak / Nili Priel
Sarah-Jane Blake / Alistair Moore
Richard Burton / Elizabeth Taylor *
Art Carney / Jean Myers
Carol Channing / Harry Kullijian
Prince Charles / Lady Camilla Parker Bowles
President Grover Cleveland / Francis Cleveland
Chelsea Clinton/ Marc Mezvinsky
Rosemary Clooney / Dante DiPaolo
Eminem (Marshall Mathers III) / Kimberly Scott
Jerry Garcia / Barbara Meier *
Elliot Gould / Jennifer Bogart
Melanie Griffith / Don Johnson *
Donna Hanover / Ed Oster
W. Averell Harriman / Pamela Churchill Hayward Harriman
Victoria Jackson / Paul Wessel
Estee Lauder / Joseph Lauder
Andie MacDowell / Rhett Hartzog *
Lee Marvin / Pamela Marvin *
Dr. William H. Masters / Geraldine Baker Oliver Masters
Columbia Shuttle Commander “Wllie” McCool / Lani McCool
Marie Osmond / Steve Craig
Tom Poston/ Suzanne Pleshette
John Raitt / Rosemary Kraemer
Vanessa Redgrave/ Franco Nero
Rihanna/ Negus Sealy
President Franklin D. Roosevelt / Lucy Mercer
President Theodore Roosevelt / Edith Roosevelt
Fred Savage / Jennifer Stone
George Segal / Sonia Schultz Greenbaum
Dorwan Stoddard/ Mavy Stoddard
Linda Tripp / Dieter Rousch
Lana Turner / Stephen Crane
Giuseppi Verdi / Giuseppina Strepponi & Teresa Stolz
Robert Wagner / Natalie Wood

2) There is usually an addictive quality to rekindled romances, to the excitement of the extreme highs and lows. You will go through an addiction withdrawal when your reunion ends. Borrow from the 12 Step

programs:

Picture yourself as an addict and go cold turkey… any communication with your lost love will set you back to Day One in your recovery. Do not take out mementos to look at, and do not listen to songs that will remind you of your lost love. Do not go to places (even online) that encourage talk about your reunion. Tell your close friends to stop you when you try to talk about the lost love. You want to take your focus off of your lost love in every way.

3) Obsessive thoughts often indicate depression. Even when you were with your lost love (especially if you were together as extramarital affair partners) you probably experienced the angst of uncertainty, fear, sadness. You are, and have been, grieving. For some people, anti-depressants help to correct the chemical imbalances triggered by the loss of a love. If the obsession can be lessened, you will heal easier.

But, the more you consciously try not to think of the lost love, the more you will think of the broken romance (like that proverbial “elephant in the living room”). Let the thoughts come, but have a plan for what to do when they do come, a substitute action that precludes thinking about the lost love. The plan must be good night or day, so don’t choose going to the gym.

4) Romances take up a lot of time. When you don’t have that to fill the hours, the obsession takes over. Plan your time so it is filled in new ways, especially at times of the day when you used to be with, or talk to, your lost love.

5) A lost love is often an ambiguous loss. The person is still alive, after all, so it’s hard to get rid of even false hopes. If you envision your situation as something only this lost love can fix, you have no power and that’s depressing! You also wait for the person to return. The way to handle this better is to assert your own decision: this person or situation was not good for you and it’s your choice to end it.

6) if your lost love is married and that’s why the reunion didn’t work, there is something helpful that you can do to get over him/her, or at least to stop the obsession at that moment (you will not like this, but it works):

Hang a sign – or if you, too, are married, put a note somewhere in your computer or wallet, where you can access it and stare at it immediately. This is the harsh reality which is what makes it effective; it leaves no room for denial, and that is what leads to healing:

[Lost Love's name] is married.

She/He lives with his/her wife/husband [spouse's name] and their children [names here].

And every day, [Lost Love's name] chooses to live with her/him (i.e., the spouse).

And every day, [Lost Love's name] chooses not to live with me.

7) Some people, perhaps a psychotherapist, might tell you to “pretend that your spouse is your lost love, to generate the same sexual feelings.” That’s a good idea — and it’s not pretending. The feelings are inside you, part of you, formed with your teen sweetheart many years ago. The feelings are not about the lost love today. They are emotional memories that were stored in your brain.

The passion is yours to use as you want. It wasn’t the lost love who was sexy. It was you. Enjoy that part of yourself.

Make a note of your answers, then click the link below
to compare with Dr. Kalish’s research findings.

Check Your Answers

Men may not do these things, but many men (straight or gay) do something more romantic than all that: they keep their love in their hearts forever.

My survey of 3000 men and women worldwide who tried reunions with lost loves asked, “How long did it take for you to get over your lost love?” Responses from the men indicated that they took significantly longer to get over their lost loves than the women. Some of the men were not satisfied with the survey choices: the last choice listed was, “Over 10 years.” Only men crossed out all the choices and wrote, “I never got over my lost love!” While no doubt some women never got over their lost loves, either, only men wrote this comment on the survey.

Adolescent boys are “not supposed” to cry over lost loves. But many of my male participants reported that, after their high school sweethearts broke up with them, they cried in private, every night, for months.

My rekindled romance findings about romantic men paralleled results of my survey of adults who never tried lost love reunions. There were significantly more men than women who chose to fill out the survey, and they expressed strong feelings for their first loves, even though they had not contacted these people (and may never do so).

Posts on the Member Forums at my web site, Lostlovers.com, are more represented by women than men. But appearances are misleading. Actually, there are more men who are members of my site than women. The men don’t post as often as the women, but they are reading!

Men more often sign up for private phone consultations with me, to talk about their lost loves, than women.

But it is a rare men’s magazine that will print a story about love and romance. Editors tell me that “men are uninterested.” Not so! When my romance research was quoted in Playboy, there was a lot of positive response. I was recently contacted by a men’s magazine and did an interview about my romance research, but after I saw that it was turning into an article solely about sex, with no love aspect at all, I declined to be included; how sad that the magazine could not include a few lines about the importance of teen romance for men.

On occasions where romance is expected (such as Valentine’s Day, birthdays or anniversaries), we should all remember to separate emotions from behaviors. Men may not make scrapbooks of mementos of their love experiences, but they are every bit as loving, loyal, and yes, romantic, as women – and sometimes more so!