I am signed up to receive Yahoo! Alerts for "rekindled romance" news. This past week, I have been notified of the following reunions:
Justin Timberlake/ Jessica Biel
Madonna/ Brahim Zaibat
Lady Gaga/ Luc Carl
Barbie/ Ken
I am happy for them. But they are not eligible to be in my research project.
My studies of rekindled romances accepted participants who had been apart at least 5 years. Separation times ranged from 5 years to 75 years (a couple married on her 95th birthday after all that time apart)!
The celebrities Yahoo! tells me about have typically been apart for only a few months. They parted, missed each other, and got back together... for now. I was looking for more than that. I was looking for people who truly let go of their old flames and formed new romances and marriages -- living life without the lost love, even if some people retained feelings for their former sweethearts. I wanted to know whether, after a breakup that seemed to be definitive, couples could reunite and make it work the second time. And I learned that indeed they can -- even couples who divorced each other and tried a second marriage to each other often successfully reunited.
As a developmental psychologist concerned with how people change or stay the same over time, I am interested in the continuity of the lifespan. We are not chopped up into sharply delineated stages, like childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. We are the same people as we develop; we stay the same more than we change. So it made sense to me that people we loved in the past might still be good partners later in life, just as we retain old friends and value our shared history with them.
Certainly not all relationships are lifelong. The majority of friends, colleagues, and loves are right for us as we go through certain aspects of our lives but not after those temporary interests are gone: a woman forms friendships with other women who have young children like she does; people who work together are close but do not retain contact after finding a different job or retiring; a man might form friendships with other men while he is single but those friendships might not work after the men are married; and sweethearts in college may be right for that time and place but not as lifelong partners.
But overall, our personalities stay the same and maintaining relationships throughout life is normative. Some loves that were lost are more successful later on, because the partners are more mature, have better communication and compromising skills, and outside factors like parental disapproval are no longer relevant.
Celebrities with on again/off again romances have had no opportunities to change and grow during their short times apart; can their reunions work any better than their first attempt at love? I suspect it would be a 50-50 tossup.
But for true lost loves in my research project - people who loved someone when they were young, separated, and then years later tried another relationship with that person when they were single, divorced or widowed -- the success rate I found was 72%. If people reunited when they were already married, well, that's another story.
As for Ken and Barbie, the dolls were named after the creator's two children, so the doll romance has always left me a little uneasy... Just kidding.
Copyright by Nancy Kalish, Ph.D.
