Finding Yourself In Front Of A Lost Love
Finding yourself face to face with a lost love can be the bellows bringing this seemingly dormant bonfire to life. It is a clash between two souls who instantly recognize each other but who carry lived experiences, unique stories and greater maturity on their shoulders. Sometimes letting that flame rekindle can make for an exceptional story. In other cases, it means reliving past mistakes.
We live in a time when it is not difficult to reconnect with childhood friends. It is the same for people with whom we have had (or not) a close, even intimate relationship. Because lost loves are figures that have awakened in us illusions, fantasies or platonic ideals. But for reasons that concern us, we have failed to establish a link with them.
Thus, it is common that we look for their name on social networks in order to reconnect. Sometimes we just do it out of curiosity. In other cases, we really want to reconnect. Sometimes it is simply fate or chance that provokes the encounter and that pushes us, without knowing how, to re-experience sensations that we thought had disappeared.
Beyond what we can think of, studies and work like that conducted by psychologist Nancy Kalish of the University of California show us that many of these encounters lead to relationships that are often fruitful. However, there are also factors that can cause them to fail. Let’s find out more in the rest of this article!
Finding yourself in front of a lost love, what can go wrong?
We unite with other people at specific times in our lives. We do it with our fears, our insecurities, our lack of experience and our needs of the present. However, if we end a real relationship and find each other after years, something very singular is going to happen.
The emotions will reappear. We will feel a familiar spark. It will revive the sensations of yesteryear, the scent of good times (because bad times tend to be forgotten), the rhythm of music that we know.
However, although the souls inhabiting our bodies are the same, we are indeed two totally different people. Life has changed us, our learning has had an impact on us and we look more cautious, wiser and more confident.
For this reason, the fact of finding ourselves in front of a lost love can be positive or on the contrary not be. Is it reasonable to want to give a new start to this relationship? What could possibly go wrong? What is in the person I recognized that I found in the person I knew?
Sometimes time provides us with the maturity that a relationship lacked
Nancy Kalish, a psychologist at the University of California, is an expert on the subject of lost and found loves. In her books such as Lost and Found Lovers, she gives us the exhaustive results of a study carried out in more than 35 countries. The goal was to find out the percentage of successful relationships that restart after breaking up in the past.
- The results could not be more striking. Couples who find each other (by being single) are successful in 72% of cases. This means that they ended up creating stable and lasting relationships. In the case of reunions between people who already have a partner, the success rate was 5% /
- One of Dr. Kalish’s assumptions is that sometimes time provides us with the maturity that we lacked in the past. It thus makes it possible to file the asperities which hurt. Living experiences, learning and life give us a psychological and emotional essence that we did not have when we were 20 years old.
- Sometimes reuniting with a lost love involves getting back someone we may have lost due to environmental influence or family or social pressure. The present then gives us the opportunity to face something that we previously did not face with courage.
From romantic love to conscious love
Psychology Thomas Lewis, author of A General Theory of Love , tells us in his book that many of us in our youth are guided by the ideal of romantic love. We seek to establish relationships based on this impossible ideal by gradually giving birth to bonds laden with dependence and vulnerability.
As we mature, we become aware of this mistake. We learn that love is not just passion. It is also commitment. We are aware of the need to respect spaces and individualities while taking care to be affectionate, to communicate and to make plans.
Time and experience allow some people (not everyone) to see the need to cultivate conscious and mature love. There is also a very interesting factor that anthropologist Helen Fisher explains to us. Sometimes we experience a “frustration pull”.
We are aware that we have made mistakes in the past with some people. We are frustrated by this lack of maturity, by these mistakes of inexperienced young people. For this, therefore, we have the impression that unfinished stories lie within us. Then we end up believing that they deserve a sequel and a more successful ending.
We are then motivated by the simple desire to recover the past relationship. It’s a new start that will have a better chance of being successful if we keep these aspects in mind. We cannot find the same conditions as before. We cannot and must not allow ourselves to make the same mistakes again.
Although we feel like the same, a lot has actually changed. This is an aspect that we absolutely must keep in mind. There are loves that will certainly deserve new chapters. However, some have already had a proper and deserved endpoint in the past.
Our thoughts Love is a feeling that must be constantly nurtured and nurtured. It also needs maturity to survive. Here are five examples.
