FRAGILE SUMMER FLINGS
Why we think they’re doomed to fail
Summer romances might end, or they might blossom — but it’s rare that they lie dormant for 25 years.
And yet, all it took was a wink for Kim and Evan Leach to resume a romance they’d long forgotten.
In the mid-1980s, they met at a weeklong YMCA summer camp in North Carolina. Kim, 14 at the time, had “googly eyes” for Evan, the popular and suave 15-yearold, so she was so giddy when he sat next to her on the bus home to Tampa, Fla., where they lived on opposite sides of town. They shared a blanket, and Kim says he may have brushed her leg at one point.
“But it was all very innocent,” she says.
They talked a little after camp, but they went their separate ways, and after college, they both married and divorced other people. It wasn’t until 2013, when Evan “winked” at Kim on Match.com and sent her a message, that they rekindled their romance. Kim recognized Evan immediately, but because Kim’s last name was hidden, it took Evan a bit of reminding to jog his memory.
After that, even though so much time had passed, it was fairly easy to pick things up again. In March, Kim, 43, and Evan, 44, married in Paris.
The Leaches’ story is the stuff of movies — think The Notebook with less tragedy and melodrama.
Still, even with both fictional and real-life examples of couples who succeed despite the limitations of summer, many still buy into the mentality of the “summer fling.”
Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who studies love and sex, says it’s very difficult to stay detached from a person after having any sort of intimacy.
The body and the brain act independently of what a person might think he or she wants. Having sex with someone releases dopamine, Fisher says, which pushes people toward getting attached or falling in love.
This biological phenomenon, though, can clash with one of our fundamental instincts: to reassess our lives at critical points. Fisher says critical points can include transitions between all seasons, but the end of summer is perhaps the biggest break of all — and thus, the most fragile.
But most of the summer’s challenges have to do with circumstance: The summer months are when people are most likely to travel, or to take risks, or to explore some place or something new.
As people expand their horizons, they’re more likely to meet or date people who aren’t similar to them.
Viviana Niebylski, 28, and Brian Senie, 27, first connected on OkCupid in 2011. It was May, and Senie had just graduated from college and was starting law school while Niebylski had just wrapped up her first year of graduate school. Neither was looking for a serious relationship at the time, and Niebylski didn’t even think she would want to meet Senie when he first reached out to her.
She found him to be charming and funny, though, so she gave him a chance. They hit it off, and they slid into a casual, mostly physical relationship.
By midsummer, things were already picking up for Niebylski. They each were still seeing other people, and when Senie went on a business trip at the end of July, Niebylski found herself missing him on more than a physical level.
The relationship continued to intensify, as they started to meet each other’s friends and go on more serious dates. “It started to look real, and I started to freak out,” Niebylski says. One night in October, she felt so “embarrassed and ashamed” that she had allowed herself to develop feelings for him that she messaged him to end the relationship.
Senie pushed back. “It felt very unfair for her to just cut it off for reasons that don’t really make sense,” he says.
They talked for a while and decided, in essence, to do the opposite of what Niebylski proposed: Against their earlier intentions, they started “using the ‘relationship’ term” and stopped seeing other people.
Looking back, neither of them thinks they were wrong to start by seeing each other more casually. Senie, especially, says that because he was less experienced and had not been in a serious relationship before, he was still trying to get his feet wet in the world of post-college dating.
But they’re happy with where they are now. Senie, now a lawyer, and Niebylski, the treatment director at her own residential mentalhealth counselling program, have lived together for two years.
“It was work to make our relationship grow and flourish, and I think we both put that in for the most part,” Niebylski says.