Find your Valentine with FriendsReunited New Zeala

Find your Valentine with FriendsReunited New Zealand

If you’ve ever wondered what happened to your first love or your brightest old flame, St Valentine’s Day is a great time to look for them on FriendsReunited New Zealand.

FriendsReunited is the reunion website which helps you find your family and friends from school, university, work and the armed forces. It has nearly 9 million members worldwide and its own special site for New Zealand www.friendsreunited.com/nz/

The site has seen many old sweethearts get back together 30, 40 or even 50 years after they split up and finally marry. It’s astonishing just how strong first love can be after so many years, which begs the question why didn’t they go ahead with it in the first place.

In days gone by it seems that sometimes that parents thought they “knew better” and split couples up because “he wasn’t good enough for our daughter” and vice versa. Then there were problems of enforced absences like national service or emigration.

Sometimes people just didn’t realise they had found the right partner straight off and chance, accident or circumstances intervened. They thought there was someone else or were plain too shy to let the other person know how they felt.

The message seems to be that where there was once a spark there just might still be a spark. To help set the mood, FriendsReunited New Zealand has put electronic Valentine’s cards on the site so you can enjoy a bit of romance, whether it’s still serious or just for fun.

But it’s not only the bride who gets to reunite, sometimes it’s the bridesmaid, mums and sons, fathers and daughters or just plain good old mates, whether it’s one-to-one or the whole class reunion.

The simplest ideas are often the best and that’s why FriendsReunited is one of the great dot.com successes. The FriendsReunited story started in Britain back in July 1999.

Site co-founder Julie Pankhurst wondered what her old school friends and what they were up to now - did they all have families of their own, still live in the same area, were they married, divorced, still alive? Evidently they were because FriendsReunited has just grown and grown.

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