Finding an Old Flame Can Lead to New Love

Sept. 22, 2009— -- A new wave of men and women are using social networking sites to find past loves in the hopes of kindling new romance.

Elise Garber is a former Chicago advertising executive in her mid-30s who could never quite find Mr. Right.

Then one day in May 2008 Garber, still single, took a dare from a friend and sent a note over Facebook to the first boy she ever kissed, Harlan Robins.

"I never expected anything to happen, and I typed in Harlan's name and his profile came up and I was stunned," Garber said.

Garber and Robins had met in the summer of 1987 on a five-week camping trip out West. During the trip a romance blossomed between the two teenagers.

"We pretty much spent five weeks making out in the back of a van," Robins said.

Twenty-one years later, the two were reunited online and then face-to-face. It didn't take long for romance to bloom again.

But it's not just Garber and Robins. People reconnecting through social networking sites are called ,retrosexuals,, a recently coined term describing people who reach back into their own life to connect with lost loves and possibly rekindle romantic relationships.

"The lost love is somebody that you always wondered what happened to them," said Nancy Kalish, psychology professor at Cal-State Sacramento. "And what could have been and what should have been. These are relationships that were interrupted."

Facebook continues to soar in popularity for older users. Adults over age 26 are quickly outpacing Facebook's younger members. According to the digital marketing firm iStrategyLabs, the number of users 55 years old and older grew about 500 percent between January and June 2009.