I'm Laura Stasi, and this is Dating While Gray, the grown-ups guide to love, sex, and relationships.

Okay, who hasn't gone online to try to find a flame from our younger years?

But taking the next step and reaching out might get

complicated. That's the topic of this episode, Boomerang Love. I get so excited reading true

stories about former loves who reconnect.

Like the high school sweethearts who broke up and then 33 years later, they run into each other virtually on a website for alumni.

He travels across a country to visit her and boom, they get back together.

But not all reconnections have happy endings.

In fact, boomerang love can be tricky.

There's actually a whole body of research on this topic.

It was conducted by a psychology professor in California named Nancy Kalish.

In the early 1990s, Nancy reconnected with her college sweetheart.

Sadly, it didn't work out, but the

experience prompted her to launch what she called the Lost Love Project. Nancy spent the next

quarter century, surveying people all over the world, writing books and research papers,

and establishing a website where people could join forums to talk about their experience

making love connections. Here's Nancy on NPR's weekend edition in 2003. These people were

couples in their formative years. They went to school together. They grew up together. They knew each

other's families. And together, they grew up together, they knew each other's families, and together

they actually define what love is. And it's a very comforting and familiar sensation to

see these people again. The other thing which I don't do research on, but I know about,

is the physiology of this, that these first

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