That Old Feeling

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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."