Lost loves. First loves. We all have them but, given the opportunity, what to do when the possibility of reunion comes up? A psychiatrist offers her story, as well as what to look for.
It is my belief that most men and women carry around, throughout their lives, the image of someone they loved in the past but with whom they did not ultimately join their lives. Someone they continue to wonder about through the years, sometimes almost obsessively -- particularly when things are not going well in their lives -- and sometimes not at all. Still, that figure haunts them and makes them wonder how different their lives may have developed with that other companion. At times they pine and long physically for the presence of this first and sometimes only real love.
As a practicing psychiatrist, I know that many of us dutifully accept the idea that most marital problems stem from unresolved conflicts in family relationships that developed long before our current partner had any influence on our well-being. But we also continue to hold an emotional, perhaps primitive, and certainly powerful belief in the fusion of two souls in love.
I became interested in the universality of the "road-not-traveled" relationship when, after a silence of 30 years, I remet and married my first love and one-time fiance, Warren Bennis, the well-known organizational management expert who founded the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California. I began to wonder why some people reactivate an old love affair when life gives them an opportunity, while most do not. I started collecting other people's stories while I continued to live out and understand my own.
Most of what I have learned about the reuniting of sweethearts -- whether after a separation of one year or 30 -- seems to be equally crucial for sustaining intimacy in long-term marriages as well. Above all, I have found, reconnecting with an old love is not just another date. No matter what age the principals, it is a psychological recapitulation that can trigger grief, anger, resentment, fear, guilt, shame -- and joy.
Such a reunion inevitably involves a review of life from the time of the original love relationship to the present. It may lead to powerful insights into your own emotional history -- a reexposure to something that has been both deeply appealing but also possibly disturbing. Both the pleasure of union with an idealized love and the remembered pain of its ending are released into consciousness once more.
Anticipation of the reunion is enormously exciting. It encourages an amazing leap across time, back to a feeling of being intensely alive. It is an attempt to recapture the self at a period when everything in life lay ahead and activates a whole chain of "what-might-have-been" thought.
The success of romantic reunions depends on the resolution of past problems. But it also hinges on the current availability of the pair. Yet even if they are committed to others, some form of reunion can still be of value. What follows is a discourse on my own experience with love regained, interspersed with what I call "The Rules of Reunion" -- practical advice garnered from both personal and professional conversations about this remarkably universal phenomenon.
There was a pile of mail on my desk, and in the 10-minute break between patients I riffled through it. I stopped breathing when I read the name on a wafer-thin blue envelope.
"Any chance you can have dinner with me on Oct. 13? Yours, Warren." I stared at the familiar handwriting of a man unforgettably extraordinary, the one who had made me feel that love for him was what he valued beyond anything, who had inscribed in the wedding ring he'd bought for me "Memento Amori" (remember to love). In retrospect, an admonition? Memory shot back 30 years. I stood in my surgical greens in the emergency room at Boston City Hospital reading his telegram ending our relationship three days before the wedding. I tore up the hundred words he proffered as explanation. He had become hard and stony with me lately. I had had a premonition that something eerily bad would happen but tried not to personalize. I attributed it to generalized prenuptial angst.
Twelve months later he got married, closing off the possibility of any reconciliation and making it clear that it wasn't marriage itself but marriage to me that had been the problem. With that rejection I knew that what felt like devotion could be temporary and contingent. What you relied upon could be gone in a flash. I was wounded in some permanent way.
After that, I kept a lot more of my thoughts to myself. I kept my guard up, you couldn't let down for a moment, couldn't speak openly, had to continually censor yourself, gauge the impact of your words before you said them. And you certainly shouldn't move in with the man you hoped to marry.
We'd met four years earlier, at the home of an academic in Boston's Back Bay. I was a third-year medical student. Eight years my senior, Warren was already a professor of management at MIT Before long, I saw very little of my apartment. When I finished at the hospital, I usually drove straight to Warren's. If I met him someplace, I'd follow him home in my little green MG. At the stoplights, I'd ease up and give his bumper a love tap. We spent four years together.
Tags:
belief that,
companion,
family relationships,
first love,
fusion,
leadership institute,
long term marriages,
management expert,
marital problems,
men and women,
old love affair,
organizational management,
sweethearts,
universality,
university of southern california,
unresolved conflicts
