Reuniting with a lost love

Reuniting with a lost love sometimes fuels, according to anthropologist Helen Fisher, our feelings of longing and passion to restart a story that we consider unfinished.

Reuniting with a lost love can be the bellows that gives life to that seemingly extinguished bonfire that is deep down dormant.. A clash between two souls that recognize each other instantly, but that carry with them other experienced crossroads, greater maturity and unique experiences on swords. Sometimes letting that flame ignite can shape an exceptional story. Other times, it means repeating past mistakes.

We live in this era in which it is not difficult to regain contact with childhood friends and, of course, with those people with whom we maintained (or not) a close, even intimate, relationship. Because lost loves are also those figures that awakened our illusions, fantasies or platonic ideals, but with whom, due to whatever circumstances, we were unable to establish any type of bond.

Thus, it is more than common for us to search for those names on social networks to regain contact. Sometimes, we do it out of mere curiosity. Others, due to the express desire to regain contact. On other occasions, it is destiny and chance that bring about the reunion. and they make us, almost without knowing how, re-experience sensations that we thought were off.

Beyond what we may think, studies and work such as those carried out by psychologist Nancy Kalish, from the University of California, show us that many of These reunions give rise to relationships that in a good number of cases are successful.. However, there are also factors that can lead us to failure. Let’s see more data below.

“We only separated to meet again.”

-John Gay-

Reuniting with a lost love, what can go wrong?

People join others at a very precise moment in our lives. We do it with our fears, insecurities, inexperiences and needs of the present. Now, if we leave that relationship at a specific time and meet again years later, something very unique will happen.

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Our emotions will be reunited. There will be a familiar spark that ignites feelings of yesteryear, the perfume of good moments (because the bad ones tend to be forgotten), the cadence of music that is familiar to us. However, even though we are the same souls in the same bodies, we are actually very different people. Life has sculpted us, learning has shaped us and our outlook is, in many cases, more prudent, wise and accurate.

All of this makes us wonder if reconnecting with a lost love can be positive or not. Would it be wise to consider restarting that relationship? What could go wrong? What is there in the person that I have recognized from the person I met?

Sometimes, time gives us the maturity that the relationship was lacking.

Nancy Kalish, a psychologist at the University of California, is an expert on this topic of loves lost and found again. In books like Lost and Found Lovers gives us the results of an exhaustive study carried out in more than 35 countries. The objective was to know what percentage of success there was in restarting relationships left at a given time in the past.

Well, the results could not have been more striking. Couples who reunited (while single) had a 72% success rate. That is, they formed stable and lasting relationships. On the other hand, in the case of reunion between people who already had partners, it was 5%. One of Dr. Kalish’s hypotheses is that, sometimes, Time gives us the maturity that we lacked in the past, filing those corners that hurt. The experiences lived, the learning and life itself give us that psychological and emotional solvency that, perhaps, we did not have when we were 20 years old. Other times, reconnecting with a lost love implies being able to recover someone that we could have lost due to environmental influences, for example. family or social pressures. The present gives us the opportunity to correct something that we do not face with courage.

From romantic love to conscious love

Psychologist Thomas Lewis, author of A General Theory of Love, He explains to us in his book that, During our youth, many of us move under the ideal of romantic love. We seek to establish relationships based on that impossible framework where, little by little, we shape links loaded with dependencies and violations.

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Now, as we mature we become aware of that error. We learn that love is not only passion, but also commitments. We realize the need to respect spaces and individualities, but at the same time taking care of that own space where we can attend to affections, communications, and projects.

Time and experience makes some people (not all) see the need to cultivate a conscious and mature love. On the other hand, there is also a very interesting factor that anthropologist Helen Fisher points out to us. Sometimes people experience what she calls “frustration attraction.”

That is to say, We are aware that in the past we made mistakes with certain people. We feel frustrated by that immaturity, those mistakes of inexperienced young people. We feel that inside us there are unfinished and not fully told stories that deserve restarts and braver endings.

Hence we take the plunge, hence our desire to recover a relationship from the past. A rescue that will have more chances of being a success if we are clear about these aspects. We cannot return in the same conditions as yesterday. We cannot and should not allow ourselves to make the same mistakes.

Because although we may seem the same, in reality there are many things that have changed, and many aspects that we must be clear about. There will be loves that undoubtedly deserve new chapters. Instead, There will be others who had an adequate and even deserved end yesterday..