🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE The good and the bad of what happens when you connect with an old flame.
When I arrived at the wine bar, there was only one open table — dimly lit and intimate. The booze, music and candlelight felt like a callback to our first kiss 15 years before, almost to the day.
Over the years, we corresponded intermittently, but not about anything deep — and never to revisit our history. But when work took me to his hometown of Santa Barbara, I reached out and asked if he’d like to meet.Apparently my urge to reconnect with an ex makes sense. “The brain develops pathways based on learned patterns,” says love expert Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University.
If that person was your first, best or most intimate, the mark is even more indelible. Such preferential encoding in the brain is one reason why stories of people reconnecting with a high school or college flame are commonplace. It was comfortable. Easy. Seeing him instantly reactivated the networks my mind encoded 15 years before. Throw a bear hug into the mix — and the accompanying flood of oxytocin — and that old brain circuitry lit up like fireworks. Justin Garcia, the associate director for research and education at the Kinsey Institute, says that’s no surprise. Just like a recovering alcoholic craving a drink after decades of sobriety, we can still be drawn to an old lover.
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