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Wonder What Happened to Your First Love?By Amanda Willis
Although we approach love and heartbreak as if our personal triumph or tragedy is the only one of its kind in the world, falling in love and losing it is something that happens to the vast majority of people throughout life. Marrying your high-school sweetheart is truly the stuff fairytales are made of; and kudos to you if you are amongst the lucky few. But most people lose their first loves--that one that got away. Whether it was because of distance, school, different life paths, a parent's disapproval, or just immaturity and not being able to handle the relationship, first love frequently dissolves. However, as anyone losing that kind of love can attest, it sticks with you for a lifetime, making its way sporadically into dreams, occasionally into conversations, and it has a habit of riding in against your will on scents and through music. It never really goes away. Heartbreak never does. It simply becomes easier to manage as time marches on. If you have ever wondered what happened to your first love, as in where are they now, rest assured that you are not alone. Not everyone chooses to seek out their first love in an attempt to rekindle the romance or even check in on the former partner's life, but the questions are still present. Dr. Nancy Kalish, a famed psychologist, wondered exactly what it was about people that gripped them so tightly to their first love. Performing research on 'rekindlers' in 1993 as part of a sabbatical project, the University of California psych professor took it upon herself to track down reunited couples and to put the screws to them, so to speak, about what made them tick. Dr. Kalish's initial goal was to interview 65 reunited lovers. After hitting the media highway, appearing in newspapers, on radio and on television, Kalish was eventually able to receive information from over one thousand reunited couples from all across the globe. The results of research made for a much appreciated book titled Lost & Found Lovers. Since its release in 1997, Dr. Kalish's book has been heralded as a revelation for lovers who thought they were 'crazy' for feeling how they felt. Throughout her research, Dr. Kalish found that the lost love, the separation, happened in most cases before puberty. Couples were not always lovers. They were sometimes neighbors, schoolmates, or close friends--a partnership wherein both parties felt comfortable and safe and shared more than any hormone-driven lust. Statistically speaking, the percentage of lost lovers reuniting and finding happiness is overwhelming. Around sixty-six percent of individuals reuniting with their lost love actually lost that love before they were 17. And of that percentage, seventy-eight percent had a successful reunion and universally seventy-two percent had a successful reunion. This was great news for those young lovers who split up. The odds were in their favor to rekindle. We say 'were' for a key reason--after researching a different set of 'rekindlers' in 2005, Dr. Kalish actually found the results to be the complete opposite of her previous study. After interviewing over sixteen-hundred reunited couples, Kalish found that reunions amongst this batch of rekindlers were almost unanimously disastrous. The baggage kept by many of these individuals, some of whom were married, was destroying the relationships they were in and keeping them from being happy. What ended up happening with this batch was that married individuals would reach out to have affairs with their lost lovers. Some married people would leave their families for the lost love and have their lives fall apart. Only a few short years apart, the results could not be more different. So what exactly was behind the 180? Think about how you needed to get in touch with someone in the mid 1990s. It is not like you could log onto Facebook or get at them through and instant messenger service. You had to do things the old-fashioned way--you had to go pat-n-turner on the pavement, ask relatives for phone numbers; you had to play a private detective to get in touch with a lost lover through manual labor. It was like a scavenger hunt, and you had better be convinced of the treasure sought, lest your labor be in vain. Remember, Dr. Kalish interviewed individuals after their final result. She did not assist them or urge them to rekindle with lost lovers. Kalish simply collected the results after the fact. Logically, if someone in 1994 was looking for a lost lover, it most likely was not to have an affair. The individual seeking out their lost love was probably not married. Because the two had completely lost track of one another, one party sought the other out due to insatiable longing. In today's world, with no one falling out of contact, a married man could run across his ex online without even looking for her and subsequently pursue an extramarital affair out of pure lust and selfishness. That seems to be the big decider in it all--the ease of rekindling with the past. Prior to the Internet's tangled web of constant contact, it took some real doing to get back in touch. With the Internet, you are likely to never fall out of touch in the first place. Your parents said no? No problem. Just send a text message. Oh, they moved to another country? So what! Hit them up on Twitter. Technology is not to fault, obviously, as technology can never force someone's hand. But with the Internet, it is certainly not hard to track down ex lovers if you ever get the urge. So be careful about wondering what your ex is up to. Unless you are single and seriously emotionally ready to pursue a relationship, the road may be rather bumpy.
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