When You Should Contact Your First Love

Kalish repeated her survey after the Internet made quick work of people-searching. “The Internet is creating these couples,” says Kalish. “Lost loves who would not have looked for each other earlier are now brought together through websites like Reunion.com.”

And therein looms a dark dilemma. “There is a decidedly detrimental and unexpected consequence to looking for a lost love online,” she cautions, and that is the destruction of existing marriages, often happy ones. In her first wave of research, Kalish says the affair rate among the couples was 30%; in her Internet-era study, that jumped to 62%.

“These already married participants had not gone looking for trouble,” Kalish says. But the scenario often played out in a predictable way. One lost love contacted another, and even though that person was married, an affair ensued. “These people did not expect the reappearance of a lost love to carry such a wallop. They thought they could merely catch up on old times, get ‘closure,’ or see an old friend.”

What’s the difference between a person who sends that first, inquiring email and the one who doesn’t? The non-re-kindlers, as Kalish calls them, were older when they dated their first loves than the re-kindlers; they had much shorter first-love romances and took less time to recover emotionally from the breakup; they’d separated from their first loves because they weren’t getting along, or had different expectations, or there was physical, sexual or substance abuse, compared to the re-kindlers’ situational factors (left for college or the military; parental disapproval, etc.). A full 70% of the non-re-kindlers said they would not try reunions with their first loves, even if they could.

The new study participants didn’t enjoy the same reunion success as the first—that number plummeted to 56% from 72% in the initial study—because most of the people who had affairs did not leave their marriages. “For the few reunited lost loves who did leave their marriages to marry each other, they had no regrets and the divorce rate was .4%. They took years to carefully consider this decision. But there was lingering pain, nonetheless,” Kalish says. Some could no longer live with their children; others lost their community standing and friendships; others took a financial hit as they divided businesses and assets with ex-spouses. And there was the enduring guilt about hurting innocent people—the children and the jilted spouse. 

Kalish points out a telling difference between re-kindlers and a garden-variety affair. In an ordinary affair, the couple has no history together and may not know each other well. It’s more about excitement. But lost and found loves share a history and know each other deeply even after so much time has passed. If their original relationship was interrupted by external factors, they seek the control they lacked the first time around, when situations or parents broke the relationship. For those who want to leave lost-love reunions, “It’s very hard,” she says. “I would liken it for some people to an addiction, where you have to do it one day at a time and cold turkey. Any kind of backsliding, you’re back to square one, just like the alcoholic.”

While reuniting with your first love might work well for people who are single, widowed or divorced and had a good relationship the first time around, Kalish cautions that people who are not planning to leave their marriages should avoid the first love reunion. “If one is married just don’t do it,” she says. “Odds are pretty high you’re going to be devastated.”