Look Him Up or Leave it Alone?

by Sarah Jane Shangraw

The meeting would prove otherwise. The dream became reality, and they’ve been married six years. “He knows the real me,” Jane explains, “the person I was before life piled on layers of living.” Recently Jane found a pocket photo of her sister in high school, with her sister’s scrawl on the back: “Don’t forget to marry Gary.” She hadn’t. And if you ask her, it was meant to be.

All Well That End’s Well?
Of course, seeking reconnection with someone from the past isn’t always welcome by the other part, and doesn’t always end so well. But you needn’t crash and burn to find the closure you seek. April from Boston says, “I found my first girlfriend on the Internet, started emailing her then calling her, and realized she’s still an asshole!” At least now she won’t have to wonder.

Neither will Carrie, though her closure came only after a friendly meeting in the park. Her childhood crush had pinged her with an email. “Is it you?” he wrote. “When I saw that message, all the others seemed to fade away,” says Carrie. “I quickly became obsessed with his emails, as we coyly traded missives back and forth.” Jeremy visited a few months later, his fiancée in tow. “I realized I no longer knew him, and I think he felt the same about me. I got the sense he was on a mission: laying to rest his could-have-beens before settling down for life with his wife-to-be.” Carrie kept pictures taken that day and can’t help but notice how much she and the fiancée look alike. “The difference is I knew the Jeremy then, and she knew the Jeremy now.”

Kalish would say “bravo.” They say you can’t go home again, but apparently this it not always true. Couples who have successfully rekindled love from their youth say finding each other was like “going home.” But to work, relationships can’t be rooted only in memory—and they can’t be resurrected in full form from the past into present-day reality. Though in some sense it might feel as if it were meant to be, it takes work. “So much of our situation was readiness on both sides,” explains Lorna.

“These things are so dangerous,” admits Jack. “Fantasy can be much better than reality. But in our case, reality turned out to be better.”