Sometimes when love calls, it's better to just hang up.
That, in fact, is the advice of Nancy Kalish, Ph.D., to a married
person who gets a call from a long-lost lover. "It usually breaks up a
marriage," she cautions. "Someone is going to get hurt."
And when it doesn't result in marital dissolution, it often leads
to adultery, Kalish said. About one fourth of lost-love relationships are
extramarital, lasting as long as 30 years.
Kalish, a professor of psychology at California State University at
Sacramento, has been scrutinizing 550 relationships in which couples
reunited after at least five years apart, most after a much longer
interval. She finds the phenomenon is quite common--a tribute to the
power and comfort of first love--and occurs at all stages of life.
Most attempts to reunite are made within 10 years. But the
re-connection is most likely to last when it is made after a much longer
separation. Overall, 60 percent of reunions between old loves
endure.
Among old flames who do marry, the divorce rate is a mere three to
four percent. "These are ecstatic relationships," Kalish notes. "They
have a higher stay-together rate than anything."
Most often, she finds, the call comes out of the blue, set in
motion by mundane occurrences. "Usually the person has some reason to go
to his or her hometown, often for a parent's funeral. That leads to the
idea of looking up the old love.
"No one understands how intense these relationships are," Kalish
adds. "People think they can simply reminisce with an old lover. But it's
a very powerful experience and they can't get out."
The sources of that power:
o romantic myth-fantasies
o a distaste for loose endings
o familiarity--these people knew each other in math class
o the primacy of early experience in shaping later love
ideals
o anxiety about the reunion revs up emotional intensity.
Says Kalish: "My advice is, if you're married and you get a call,
don't connect."
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