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She met up with her 12th-grade boyfriend, who is happily married and wanted her to meet his kid. Then she reconnected with her first crush, "the embarrassing kind where I couldn't even talk to him, I liked him so much." He had liked her too; they confessed their old crushes on each other through MySpace and arranged to meet in person the next time Stein was in town. But when she met him at a bar, she was immediately disappointed. He had gained weight, worked in a dead-end job and had already been engaged three times. "I was like, um, no," she says.
The third meeting — with a boy whom Stein would occasionally meet after high school for what she describes as a "behind-the-bleachers sort of thing" — went differently. He found Stein on Facebook, and they began talking. Stein added him to her list of people to see. They met for dinner, but "it was beyond awkward," and their conversation felt forced. So they left and went to a pool hall.
Several hours and drinks later, the former flings were kissing. Then Stein went home with him. In the morning, she made the drive of shame back home to her parents' house. "Here I was, almost 30, and my mom was so pissed at me," Stein says. She felt as if she were back in high school.
Stein doesn't know what inspired her to do something like that. They knew each other. They had talked extensively through Facebook, and their fling felt like more than a one-night stand. But it was definitely less than a real relationship. They had a history, a rapport. They weren't just hooking up; they were doing something they had always wanted to do but had been too young to try. "It was fun," says Stein. "I got this really great closure, and it felt safe in a weird way."
And what about Elise Garber and her first kiss, Harlan Robins? For them, life really did resemble a romantic comedy. Robins remembered his summer-camp girlfriend and replied to her Facebook message. They agreed to meet for drinks the next time he was in Chicago. When they saw each other, something clicked. They talked into the night, went out the next day, then decided to give their long-distance retrosexual romance a try. Surprisingly, it worked. Garber quit her advertising job and moved to Seattle to be with him. On Sept. 6, they married. "And to think," says Garber, "I worried that we'd spend the whole evening talking about summer camp."