That Old Feeling

By Francine Russo

Jody Kraus was Bud Shipley's girl from the time the two teens met back in 1933 in Bartlesville, Okla. They and their families expected that they would get married when she finished college. But on her first visit home, she told him she had dated a classmate. "Bud wasn't much for demonstrating," she says. "I was trying to be coy and find out how he felt about me. Bud got up, said, 'That's it,' and walked out the front door."

"I assumed she'd lost interest in me," says Shipley, now 84. They didn't speak again for over 50 years. She wed the boy from college on the rebound, had two kids and was divorced seven years later. He married, had three kids and was widowed in 1993. A few months later, at a friend's urging, Kraus called Shipley, who instantly recognized her voice and agreed to come see her in Tulsa. When they met on her front porch, they threw their arms around each other. Both saw the same person they had loved, just older. Six months later, they married.

I often looked back and wished I had talked it out with her," Bud says. Over the years he has learned to be more communicative. Both declare their reunion a godsend. "It seemed so natural," says Jody, 83, "as if you'd been away from your home, unlocked the door and walked in."

Like Jody and Bud Shipley, many people have moments they wish they could go back to and do over, knowing what they know now. It's a powerful fantasy and the premise of the 1993 film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray has to relive the same day until he finally gets it right--and wins Andie MacDowell. Even if the fateful moments aren't so much mistakes as simply choices, the "what if" can remain tantalizing across the years. It impels a lot of folks to try to look up an old flame.

Now technology has provided a powerful tool to help the quest to rekindle romance or just satisfy curiosity: the Internet. More and more former sweethearts are using websites like ussearch.com and classmates.com to locate one another. The sites report huge growth in the past five years but say lost-love searches account for only part of it. The sites do hear from happily reunited couples. Classmates received 235 lovers' thank-you notes in 2000 and 336 in 2001.

This underscores a basic change in American life. Distance is not what it used to be. Thirty years ago, a separation of more than a day's drive could prove fatal to romance. Travel was expensive; long-distance calls were for special occasions. The romance of Iris Cornelius and David Washington shows just how much times have changed.

Cornelius and Washington, who are "between 55 and 65," dated through high school in Pittsburgh, Pa., and long distance in college. They loved each other, but he stayed put and she moved to Providence, R.I. "We went in different directions," Washington explains. "The distance was the major reason."

They each married. After nearly three decades, Cornelius was divorced about the same time Washington was widowed. Cornelius, a psychologist living in Minneapolis, was thinking of moving back East. She called several old friends, including Washington, a lawyer, still in Pittsburgh. "I thought," he recalls, "if I ever get to Minneapolis, I'll get in touch." A law meeting brought him there in 1990, and sparks flew. Each was amazed at how unchanged the other seemed. He told her, "You know, I have always loved you." She was hooked. They visited each other on weekends. The distance no longer seemed far. "And," she adds, "we could afford to travel." In 1991 they married and commuted between each other's cities until, in 1997, he transferred to Minneapolis, where he is now an administrative judge.

How likely are such reconnections to succeed? Psychologist Nancy Kalish, author of Lost & Found Lovers, says her research suggests that the odds are good. Of 1,000 couples who got together again after a separation of five years or more, 72% were still together, one for 50 years. Kalish acknowledges that hers is a self-selected sample but points out that she has made public her own failed attempt to rekindle an old love and often hears about failures on her website, lostlovers.com

What such research doesn't reveal, notes Robert Billingham, an Indiana University psychologist, is how many people try to reconnect and are rebuffed. Also, he adds, "those who think, 'Well, you've got bald and bloated,' tend not to write in." Not all reunion stories have a happy ending. The very thing that can make a match--the feeling that you already know each other--can be a snare, as Lisa Liken, 42, a Southern California drama teacher, found when she was e-mailed by a high school boyfriend living abroad. On a month-long trip home, he began living with her and proposed. They carried on a long-distance romance for two years. "Because I knew him from before, my defenses were down," says Liken. Eventually he told her he didn't believe in fidelity and dropped her for someone else.

Complications can arise if one or both of the former lovers are married. Debbie Wells was happily married with two kids when Bill Wade, her fiance at age 18, called. He had been in the service, her parents disapproved, and they broke up. Now, 24 years later, a married veterinary technician, he impulsively looked her up on the Web and discovered she lived nearby. She invited him and his family to meet hers. When he arrived, "he gave me a small kiss on the lips, and we both felt as if hit by lightning." Within six months, they left their spouses, and about a year later, they wed. "What happened to us was a great thing," says Debbie Wade, 46, a Midwest financial manager. "But we regret the hurt we caused our ex-spouses and kids."

"These people," comments Billingham, "have made an unusual decision and need to justify it. 'Love made me do it,' they say, and everybody says, 'Ohhh.'" He warns about casual contacts. "If somebody is unhappily married and you e-mail them, you've made their marriage more complicated. If you're married and a divorced person gets in touch, have you now put your family at risk? It's a can of worms."

Still, late-life reunions can make for good relationships. Shared history and values grow more compelling as people age. Says Laura Carstensen, a Stanford University psychologist who studies emotional development in adulthood: research shows that "relationships benefit from knowledge of a person earlier in life." As people retire from careers, external signs of identity, like an office or affiliation, disappear. So it's valuable to know someone from your past "who knew you as you."

Emily Findlay Brown, 66, and Jerry Willingham, 68, met while roller-skating in Alexandria, Va., at 16 and 18. "We went together one year," recalls Brown, a psychotherapist, "and then he dumped me." "She was going to go to Stanford," explains Willingham, a retired manager of airline mechanics, "and I knew it would be over for us. I was just going to beat her to the punch. It was 19-year-old logic." He had always hoped he'd get a chance to apologize.

She married, had kids, divorced. He married, had kids, was widowed. After his wife died, he bought a computer and tracked Emily through Classmates. Then he called from his home in Atlanta and asked whether he could visit her in Alexandria. He apologized, and she was impressed. Their romance took off, and last May, they married.

Willingham was happily married before but says this time is different. "I can talk more to Emily. We talk. Gosh, we talk." Paradoxically, late marriages can be better because the spouses are at once more mature and, in a sense, teenagers again. "All the research shows raising children eats into the quality of the marital relationship," says Keith Davis, a University of South Carolina psychologist. "With a new partner, it's just the two of you, and everything else be damned."