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.

It seems as though almost everyone online has searched for a lost love at least once.

"Well, people are naturally curious about what their exes are doing, so Facebook is a great tool to Facebook-stalk the people in your past," one user said.

But innocent curiosity isn't the only thing driving people to dig into their past for romance. Kalish, a psychologist who studies lost love, said teenage hormones are stored as sensory and emotional memories that can leave young love imprinted on the brain.

"It doesn't mean that we have to be with that person, but what it does mean is that in the adolescent years there are these hormones, sexual and growth hormones, and everything else, and you encode the person in a sensory way," she said.

But sometimes reigniting lost love can disrupt happy lives and prove detrimental to people who are already married.

For Garber and Robins, however, the reunion was meant to be, and the couple was married two weeks ago.

Garber said she never really did believe in fate or destiny but admits, "this has been kind of strange."

ABC News.com's Ki Mae Heussner contributed to this story.