Here's to Old Friends

It seems harmless enough. Out of the blue you receive an email from an old flame, someone you haven't thought about in many years, just wanting to "catch up." They were able to locate you just by searching sites like Classmates.com or Facebook. As the emails go back and forth, something else is happening -- you're beginning to feel like a teenager again, reigniting passion and energy that you haven't felt in years. It's invigorating and exciting and it's also a sure-fire way to end your marriage.

Neuroscientists have discovered that raging teenage hormones are stored as sensory and emotional memories, which is why connecting with relationships from the past is so alluring and becoming so common. The emotions associated with young love may be imprinted on the brain and released when you chat with your first love online or speak on the phone. This is bad news for marriages because as much as the offending spouse will rationalize it's innocence, I'm going to state this as clearly and plainly as I can: secretly reconnecting with a former lover is cheating on your spouse. Allowing those emotions to develop threatens the foundation of your current relationship--the love, trust, and emotional bond that you've built with your partner. It's no different than a physical affair in that you're going outside of your marriage and developing an intimate relationship with someone other than your spouse. And the secrets that are being kept are never protective of the marriage.

Nancy Kalish, a professor of psychology at California State University in Sacramento researched thousand of lost love reunions and has studied the disastrous aftermath of these relationships. She found that happy marriages were more at risk than troubled relationships -- of the 62% of re-kindlers who were married before they reconnected, more than half reported that their marriage was good or excellent. They also reported that once they restarted the old relationship, they had trouble stopping.

The moral of this story is don't assume strolling down memory lane is without danger. Reconnecting with old friends can be a positive bridge from your past to your present. However, reconnecting with a past lover can create a major rift in your marriage and create a crisis of trust that is difficult to recover from. If reconnecting with your old friend remains a secret from your spouse, your marriage is in trouble. So if you get an email from someone who used to make your heart flutter, think twice before you hit the "reply" button