It's OK to regret your lost love

Lost love
Lost love

Social media has made the world uncomfortably close these days. That six degrees of separation has been proven many, many times over as you discover that someone you went to college with - five states away - knows someone in your book club or that your cousin's best friend's uncle is related to the chick who sits in the cubicle next to you at work. Scary.

With the four walls of the universe closing in on all of us, it makes us seem accessible to just about anybody. Even folks you never really wanted to see or hear from again (cough, cough Malik).

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But there are cases where sites have united people who have been thinking about one another for years and years and just didn't have a way to sniff out a set of definitive whereabouts. Not everyone was a MySpacer but just about everybody and their mother's mother is on Facebook or Twitter. The connectivity is bringing old flames back together. You know… the one that got away.

Now, common sense says that there's a reason why folks break up and don't make it into a lifetime love affair. And if you're like me, you can rifle through your past with confidence and say there's no one you'd ever really be interested in rekindling anything with. Even though I can be pleasant and friendly with some, the dudes on my resume are all goodbye and good riddance. Not a chance for a re- anything. But I'm a sucker for a lost-and-found love story - I get pulled into The Notebook every single time TNT airs it, which is like every weekend - and it's even better when it's real life.

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Sometimes we have a tendency to romanticize relationships from the past when in actuality, they really weren't all that we've made them out to be in our minds. Oh yeah - you forgot how bad that gambling habit really was or his refusal to take showers on a daily basis or, at the very least, swish a toothbrush around in his mouth for a few seconds. Those kinds of things are minimized when you're daydreaming about the beau who was so fantastic while your current dude is in the adjacent room frying the bacon grease out of our last living nerve.

All that glitters ain't gold, though, so I just implore anybody who's stumbled across - or stalked down - their long lost love to look at it objectively before emotions start running high all over again. Evaluate what the situation calls for. Sometimes it's nice to just catch up and leave it at that (again cough, cough Malik). But sometimes, if you're footloose and single and not attached to anybody, and that one person pops back into your life, it might just be kismet.

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Barring recent releases from long prison stretches or any weird addictions it might be worth another shot, provided of course that you're not just reaching back to someone old and familiar because you're too scared or too exhausted or too intimidated to kick off a brand spankin' new relationship with somebody fresh.

But golly gee, there must be folks aplenty out there pining over their ex-flames and former boos. A Google search for "long lost love" turns up all kinds of how-to instructional tips and sites dedicated just to locating a long lost love. So if Facebook or Twitter fail you, there sure are a boatload of websites that connect folks who might wanna get that old thing back.

Have you ever sniffed around for one of your used-to-bes? Did y'all end up getting back together?

Image via Juliana Coutinho/Flickr

Written by Janelle Harris on CafeMom's blog, The Stir.

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