Could you fall in love with your partner a second time?  It’s a question couples dealing with extreme brain injury have to face.

It’s distressing when Alzheimer’s disease destroys memories – and the man or woman married 50 years is faced with a partner who no longer remembers their most intimate companion.

It’s probably even more devastating when couples in their prime of their relationship find the bonds of love severed by traumatic memory loss.

Forgot She Was Married

The Vow, a movie starring Rachel McAdams, Channing Tatum, Sam Neill and Jessica Lange due for release in cinemas in February, is based on just such a story: that of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter, who had a devastating car accident just 10 weeks after getting married, 18 years ago.

Krickitt, a former gymnast and college sports star, fractured her skull and was in a coma for 10 days. Three weeks after the accident, she could name her parents. But when the nurse asked, “Who’s your husband?” she replied: “I’m not married.”

The Daily Telegraph reports tests confirmed she’d “lost” 18 months of memory, including the whole period where she met Kim, fell in love and got married.

http://www.thevow-movie.com/

Could You Fall In Love Over Again?

Their story is about many things: faith (both are very religious), marriage vows, and how to be a good person.

But mostly it raises the question: if you suddenly found your husband a stranger, could you fall in love with him all over again?

Experts agree when faced with this situation, it’s not so much a question of re-establishing an existing relationship, as beginning a whole new one.

“Shared memories are terribly important,” says Lisa Appignanesi, author of All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion,  “When people split up later in life, one of the things they say they miss most is this ability to have someone who has kept in them a record of your past.

“You don’t have this shared past together you can think about, look back on, or even just mention in a haphazard and irrelevant way.”

When English couple Paul and Kathleen Grieves faced this challenge after Paul lost his memory in a motorbike accident, he could not recall anything of their honeymoon on Santorini.  So they’ve been on holiday to Rhodes to “create new shared memories.”

How About You?

So how about you?  Would you “do it all again” with your partner – memory loss or no memory loss? We’d love to hear your views on how hard you think it would be for you to recreate love all over again.

Image take from imdb.com

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About the author

Jenny W