By Neil Hobden
Facebook has become the new Friends Reunited. Just as the website designed to bring together old school friends reignited thousands of playground romances – and broke up countless marriages as a result – so “second generation” social networking sites such as Facebook are also being used to track down lost loves.
Now that Facebook is as popular with 30-, 40- and 50-somethings as it is with the college students who pioneered it, the site is increasingly becoming a way of searching out former boyfriends and girlfriends.
“Facebook makes it easier for you to take that first step of finding someone again,” Rainer Romero-Canyas, a psychology research student at Columbia University, was quoted as saying this week’s Time magazine. “It has finally provided a way for people to reach out to someone without fear of rejection.”
The Boston Phoenix has even coined a term – “retrosexuals” – to describe people who take the plunge into recycled love.
Coinciding with the Time article, figures published in Britain this week confirm the trend of using the internet to track down old flames. Up to half of online users have logged on to look up an old boyfriend or girlfriend, even if it was someone who dumped them, a survey found.
One in four is searching for a childhood sweetheart, one in five for an old boyfriend or girlfriend and one in ten for a former partner.
Nearly 40 per cent said they sought out an ex simply because they wanted to “see what they were doing these days”, according to the poll of 1,000 adults by search engine Ask Jeeves.
Although only four per cent said they harboured hopes of rekindling a former romance, the research found that in fact seven per cent got back together with a past love.
This new tool for making contact with people from the past is great for those who are in a position to hunt down their old flames, but for those in marriages or long-term relationships, even the most innocent contact can cause problems.
What starts out as almost idle curiosity overlaid with a touch of nostalgia can lead people to get emotionally embroiled with former sweethearts, precipitating many marriage breakdowns. If you are in a stable relationship, therefore, it is probably not wise to make contact with someone who broke your heart two decades ago.
On the other hand, people whose marriages have ended now have a way of finding new love again – with an old one! Returning to the dating scene after divorce can be a daunting prospect, so Facebook provides a way of looking for romance again from the comfort of your own home and with someone you once knew. With divorce so widespread, it is possible that an old flame will also be single and equally keen to find love again. And this can bring new happiness to those who have gone through the misery of divorce.
- Neil Hobden is a partner with Benussi & Co