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"Every time I dig through my jewelry box, I stumble across the necklace a close college friend gave me over 30 years ago: a perfect rectangle of iridescent lapis lazuli butterfly wing preserved beneath a small dome of glass, dangling on a silver chain. The exquisite antique haunts me for two reasons: because it had originally been a present to my friend, Darcy Lowell, from her grandmother, and because my friendship with Darcy came to an uneasy, unresolved end. So when Good Housekeeping asked me to investigate the burgeoning trend of reconnecting online by tracking down a dropped connection or two of my own, I took it as a sign. Darcy and I had been opposites who attracted. As an almost six-foot-tall outsider from a nomadic military family, I found her petite blonde all-American beauty, cheerleader vivacity, and privileged small-town background irresistibly exotic. Darcy, in turn, was fascinated by my rootless childhood. With the butterfly-wing necklace, she symbolically gave me the claustrophobic security she was trying to escape.  I gave Darcy wings of a different sort. In 1971, during our junior year, we abandoned college to hitchhike and Eurail in Europe and its environs \u2014 a trip that intensified our friendship and then destroyed it. Bound by a shared language and hours spent in cramped train compartments, we had only each other. In that isolation, small slights gradually metastasized into unforgivable offenses. Barely 20, I grew weary of always being the grown-up; she seemed weary of me. After a tense ride from Marrakech, Morocco, to Algeciras, Spain, we parted ways, with no explanation and no plans to meet again on that or any other continent. But all these years later, besides returning the necklace, I wanted to understand why our friendship fell apart, to tell her my side of the story, and to hear hers. I wanted to know what&amp;#039;d happened to her since. And I wanted to see her for the reason I think we all want to reconnect with people from our past: She&amp;#039;d been part of my life, and, for better or worse, she helped make me who I am now. Click Here Reconnecting has never been more popular, largely because it&amp;#039;s never been easier. Over the past few years, social networking has grown dramatically, with 127 million Americans now visiting these Websites each month, according to Sarah Radwanick, marketing-communications analyst at ComScore, Inc., a global Internet information provider. Many networks, like Facebook and Friendster, allow you to make new friends, but &amp;quot;they&amp;#039;re set up to facilitate reconnection, too,&amp;quot; says Chris Brogan, vice president of strategy and technology at CrossTech Media, which tracks technology trends. Specialized sites like classmates.com and reunion.com, which together claim about 75 million registered members, focus on reunions. And ordinary search engines let us find in minutes information that once took weeks of letter-writing and long-distance calling, or hiring a detective to uncover.  From Brogan, I also learned that most searches, like mine, are for a lost friend; next most common, for an old flame. Ironically, I knew my easiest route to finding Darcy would probably be to ask my own lost love, Jacob. We&amp;#039;d first met because he was pals with several of Darcy&amp;#039;s many boyfriends; after I returned from Europe to finish college, I ran into him again. He was 6&amp;#039;4&amp;quot; \u2014 a good four inches taller than me \u2014 and could make me laugh until I wet my pants; how could I not fall in love? After graduation I moved with him to Austin. Austin lasted, but our romance didn&amp;#039;t. I was left holding the torch I carried with Olympic-level fervor until meeting the man I married. Kick up those embers? No way. And, after all, who needs an old sweetheart when you have Google? I entered the name Darcy Lowell and watched my screen start listing 345,000 entries. Even enclosing her name in quotation marks didn&amp;#039;t whittle this giant sequoia of data down to a usable size. I couldn&amp;#039;t remember the name of Darcy&amp;#039;s high school, so I bypassed classmates.com and reunion.com and went directly to our college&amp;#039;s alumni association site. All the Lowells it had were too young, too old, or too male. Depressed \u2014 millions of people have caught up with long-lost school pals on the Internet! Why not me? \u2014 I decided I wanted to be part of someone&amp;#039;s success story. I joined my own high school&amp;#039;s alumni association online, where I posted an open-ended message asking anyone who remembered me to get in touch. Having made my offering to the reunion gods, I turned back to the hunt and plugged into some more specialized search engines. Wink let me perform a one-hit comprehensive search of major social networks. Pipl claimed to dig up info that a Google search can miss, from spots like personal Web pages, press mentions, and Amazon wish lists. But the little engine that could was ZabaSearch, which directed me to Intelius; there I found listings of places where a Darcy Lowell had lived. I instantly spotted a constellation that included my Darcy&amp;#039;s hometown and the city where we&amp;#039;d gone to college. For a few dollars, I bought an address, and my heart stopped when Google Maps showed it was just blocks from the country club near where she&amp;#039;d grown up. Certain this had to be where Darcy lived, I reverse-searched the address for a phone number. Nervous now that actual contact seemed imminent, I was both frustrated and relieved when the number came up &amp;quot;unlisted.&amp;quot; I overnighted a letter to the address, begging Darcy to contact me. And then I waited. Rekindling Old Flames After two weeks, I accepted that no answer would be coming. Choosing to believe that my letter had never reached Darcy, I faced up to the inevitable: I&amp;#039;d have to contact Jacob. Fifteen years ago, my search would have stopped there. While I did have a mailing address for him, a letter seemed too portentous, and I couldn&amp;#039;t bear calling mutual friends to ask for his private number. I could hear their speculations: Was Sarah still carrying a torch? Was her marriage in trouble? Brogan had mentioned that reconnectors now feel safer because they can make contact via computer, but I realized that the Internet conferred another benefit: No one else has to know about your search. After mere minutes of Googling, I had the timid reconnector&amp;#039;s best friend: an e-mail address. I sent a breezy message winging Jacob&amp;#039;s way \u2014 breezy because I&amp;#039;d worked to make it so. After all, I was only writing to find Darcy. Wasn&amp;#039;t I? The butterflies that rose in my stomach when Jacob&amp;#039;s name popped up in my in-box moments later begged to differ: They had nothing to do with Darcy&amp;#039;s necklace. &amp;quot;Sarah,&amp;quot; Jacob&amp;#039;s e-mail began. &amp;quot;You are still the best. How excellent to hear from you.&amp;quot; In our back-and-forth, he told me about his three daughters, his wife of 18 years, how he&amp;#039;d gotten an M.B.A. Then he wrote that he&amp;#039;d like to hear more about my life and included his phone number. And, just like that, the years disappeared and I was again the besotted young woman caroming from exhilaration to despair. The intensity of my reaction unnerved me. But what truly gave me pause was my impulse to hide the e-mails so that my husband wouldn&amp;#039;t come across them. Disturbed, I phoned the leading expert in a field I never imagined would pertain to me: rekindled romance. Nancy Kalish, Ph.D., a developmental psychology professor at California State University in Sacramento, has researched more than 2,000 of these reunions, and she interrupted me the instant I told the white lie that I was &amp;quot;planning on&amp;quot; getting in touch with an old flame. &amp;quot;Did you know that reconnecting with a lost love can be like taking cocaine?&amp;quot; she demanded. &amp;quot;Fifty percent of the rekindlers I&amp;#039;ve surveyed report that they&amp;#039;d had wonderful marriages \u2014 before they reconnected. They didn&amp;#039;t expect meeting again to pack such a wallop. Now that looking for old flames is so easy and trendy, happy marriages are crumbling.&amp;quot; Uneasily, I pooh-poohed the possibility that anyone&amp;#039;s marriage was in danger. &amp;quot;Apparently, my lost love has a gorgeous wife.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Doesn&amp;#039;t matter,&amp;quot; Kalish warned. &amp;quot;Wrinkles, weight, none of that matters. Some neuroscience research suggests that early loves are encoded in the brain, the same way cocaine addiction is. Seeing that person again, talking on the phone, even e-mail triggers all those visceral memories of being young and in love. Do not call this man.&amp;quot; Having glimpsed the dark side of reconnection, I decided not to call Jacob. But I did dare to e-mail him to ask if he knew anyone who was still in contact with Darcy \u2014 and to tell him that I would always be grateful to him for putting me on the path that eventually led me to the life I was meant to have. He responded with an e-mail address for Andy, who had dated Darcy decades ago but might still be in touch. Finally \u2014 Reconnection As I was sending Andy a message, an e-mail appeared (care of my high school alumni association) from Tami Szerlip. Just seeing that name triggered memories of a soft-spoken girl with soulful eyes and a braid as thick as my wrist. She had somehow slipped out of my life \u2014 but my aimless plea had brought her back. I zipped off a reply, and soon Tami and I were swapping stories. I discovered she lives on Mercer Island, near Seattle, where I&amp;#039;d soon be visiting to look at colleges with my son. We made a date, and a few weeks later, I entered the shop where Tami works. Its name? Finders. Behind shelves of luscious soaps, adorable teapots, and a pillow embroidered with the words, &amp;quot;Good friends are hard to find, harder to leave, and impossible to forget,&amp;quot; I spotted Tami. One look and I knew she was exactly the same person she had been when I first met her in junior high: kind, sensitive, artistic. That evening, over salmon caught and prepared by her husband, Rod, she and I fell back into a friendship that seemed never to have been interrupted, but felt deeper for the self-understanding we&amp;#039;d both gained over the years. We caught up on my son&amp;#039;s college search, my writing, her two nearly grown daughters, her lifetime of work for equality in education, her painting. It was the kind of communion reconnectors dream of \u2014 a celebration of our shared past, an affirmation of our future. When we parted, she gave me a softball-size bar of cucumber-scented soap, and the magic of our visit lingered with me all the way back to Austin. At home, I found a message from Andy, Jacob&amp;#039;s friend, who hadn&amp;#039;t seen Darcy in years. Sarah, last I saw Darling Darcy was in deep Brazilian bush. I miss her. I have put out notices for her contact info. It will work in time. Siempre, Andy So my attempt at reuniting with Darcy, like my parting from her, remains ... unresolved, unfinished. But just like our European sojourn, the trip was filled with unexpected delights, disappointments, and dangers, as I suspect most reconnections are. For the first time in history, anyone can answer that most enticing of questions: &amp;quot;Whatever happened to?&amp;quot; A few keystrokes can (almost always) reveal what&amp;#039;s become of our high school heroes; where life has taken our old friends; what&amp;#039;s befallen our vanished heartthrobs. Perhaps gathering up those dropped threads gives us a greater sense not just of who we were, but of who we&amp;#039;ve grown to be: This time around, I recognized \u2014 and resisted \u2014 the lure of the old flame, and found that a true friendship could grow even stronger through years of separation. What I will learn from Darcy remains a mystery. For now, I&amp;#039;m content to have my search end in the deep Brazilian bush. I imagine Darcy there, lapis lazuli butterflies fluttering about her head. But I trust that Andy is right, that my message &amp;quot;will work in time,&amp;quot; and the shimmery bit of wing will finally fly back to its rightful home. 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