Second Chance At Love

It was a typical college romance. Richard Allen and Lynne Griffiths dated, drifted apart after graduation, found others and moved on. Focused on having a big-city career, Griffiths headed to Manhattan with a degree from Connecticut College in New London in 1974. Allen, a Yale Divinity student, would have settled down with Griffiths in any place but New York City while he answered a spiritual calling to become a Methodist minister. And that presented another glitch: Griffiths, an avowed Unitarian, couldn’t imagine forsaking her religion. End of story?

Not exactly. This April the two celebrated their seventh wedding anniversary in New York, where Allen, 57, is pastor of a Methodist congregation and Griffiths, now Lynne Allen, 54, a career coach, regularly attends services at her husband’s church. Before they reconnected, the two hadn’t been in touch for more than 20 years when she tracked him down through the Yale alumni office.

Richard and Lynne Allen are part of a trend in which couples are not simply reuniting with former lovers or friends but often actively seeking them out after decades apart. “People go to reunions to find an old flame. They use Classmates.com to look up the one that got away or someone they always had a crush on,” says Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the author of Finding Your Perfect Match (Perigee). “They bump into each other and find a reconnection easy and immediate. Although there are no numbers, anecdotally it seems quite common that people are connecting with old loves.”

The high divorce rate and the death of some spouses have returned many baby boomers to the dating arena. Most expect to live an additional 20 or 30 years, and they are determined not to go it alone. “They’re doing their 50s unlike any other generation [has done them],” says Schwartz. “They’re on an active hunt for companionship using all kinds of tools–online dating, joining clubs and looking for love where they found it before: in high school, college, relationships from their 20s.”

Websites like Classmates and Reunion.com are tailor-made tools in this quest for another chance at romance with a school-day ex. These cybersubstitutes for the class reunion offer millions of members access to former classmates who have registered on the sites. They entice recruits looking for love to join with testimonials from reunited couples.

The reconnecting trend has been fueled by media coverage of such high-profile rematches as TV personality, actress and former New York City first lady Donna Hanover and her old beau and now husband, Ed Oster. Hanover chronicled her experience and others like it in My Boyfriend’s Back: 50 True Stories of Reconnecting with a Long-Lost Love (Plume). But the biggest incentive may be that hooking up with a friend from the past holds the promise of future ease. “There is an expectation of immediate comfort with someone supposedly familiar, as well as an expectation of similar values based on a common history–and therefore perhaps of not having to work so hard to build a bond,” says marriage counselor William Doherty, a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota who has worked with couples for three decades.

Equally important, an old love can spark a passion that renews the couple’s memories of their youth. “It’s almost like we’re 17 again, and we can explore things together–except that we’re 53,” explains Mike Hagen of Midland, Mich., who reconnected five years ago with Vivian Menko through Classmates.

The two originally met when Menko was a high school exchange student from Brazil in Hagen’s hometown of Caro, Mich. “When Vivian went back to her country, it was a relationship interrupted,” Hagen says. “Now we have a chance to pick up where we left off. It’s exciting.” They lost contact after Menko left the States, mostly because in the 1970s communication between the two countries was challenging. A letter could take a month to arrive, and telephone calls were costly. In the interim, they married others and had children. In 2001, divorced and living with her son in Sao Paulo, Menko posted a message on the website seeking information about Hagen. “I always remembered Mike because he was the kindest, gentlest man I ever met,” she says. Shortly afterward, Hagen signed up too. Recently separated, he was surprised and delighted when he read Menko’s notice. “I couldn’t believe she wanted to hear from me after 30 years,” he says. They got in touch immediately. The next year they met in Las Vegas, then went to Hagen’s home in Michigan. Within two years, Menko made the wrenching decision to emigrate from Brazil and the happy one to marry Hagen. In March the couple, now both 54, celebrated their third anniversary.

Neither cultural nor geographical barriers separated former sweethearts Pat Condon and Dave Duranti, who dated briefly in 1967. In fact, most of the time since high school, they had resided in the same town–New London, Conn., where they ran in different social circles. They each married others, and Duranti and his first wife had a son. Eventually, though, both Condon and Duranti divorced their spouses. Then, about five years ago, Condon ran into Duranti and invited him to a Christmas party at her house. The romance rekindled. At their wedding reception in 2004, a table centerpiece displayed two pictures–one of them together in 1967 and another in 2003–accompanied by the message “Then and now, written in the stars.” Says Duranti, 63, about getting back together with Condon, 58: “It was comfortable, it was warm, it was nice. I wanted to stay.”

Not every reconnected couple enjoys a happy ending, of course. The divorce rate in second marriages is about 15% higher than in first ones, and matches between old lovers and friends aren’t immune. A lonely man in Taos, N.M., in his late 40s jumped into a relationship with a former classmate he saw at a high school reunion in Dallas. After a whirlwind courtship, they married, and she moved in with him in Taos. But they quickly encountered difficulties, primarily over money. Within six months, the marriage was kaput. “People change,” says Schwartz. “Experiences change them, and they wind up with emotional baggage and history. In the glow of a renewed love and its feelings of comfort and familiarity, the couple may ignore this.”

Most marriage counselors recommend that reunited couples take the same precautions they would with any new relationship: go slowly, and reacquaint yourselves little by little. That advice can fall on deaf ears for some who, feeling so nostalgic about the old connection and safe with the person who shared it, believe they’ve been there and done that 20 or 30 years ago. “Our hearts are open when we’re young, and the person we knew then can make a big impression. It’s understandable that people want to go back to that experience,” explains Doug Moseley, the co-author with his wife Naomi Moseley of Making Your Second Marriage a First-Class Success (Three Rivers Press). But, says Naomi, “it can be just as difficult to meet an old beau as a new person. Even though you have those memories, you have to realize you are 50 or 55, not 20.”

Still, many old sweethearts who have landed in fulfilling new partnerships relish the fact that they’re not 20 and feel lucky to have reunited with their former love at midlife, when they can truly appreciate each other. Just ask Richard and Lynne Allen. “We had both grown through our life experiences by the second time we met,” says Lynne. “But we also had those fond memories of our relationship when we were younger. The marriage has been great for both of us.” Adds her husband: “She’s mellowed and I’ve mellowed. It’s all about compromise.”