Can you fall in love with the same person twice?

The One Show (BBC), today, is featuring couples who got back together after many years apart. In some cases they were involved with other people but then re-connected after gaps of 9, 27, 34 years. These people genuinely stopped loving each other but years later, sometimes completely by chance, met up and formed happy and lasting partnerships all over again.

A question sometimes asked of agony aunts and in chat-rooms: can you fall in love with the same person twice?

There are a number of celebrity second marriages (Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, for example) but they typically don’t last long.

But how about the situation where you genuinely forget about the other person, so when you see them you genuinely don’t remember having known them before. Yes I know it seems to be about to happen in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but anything can happen in films. This is even stranger.

Back when I gave up football, I guess around 2004, I would make a point of jumping on our exercise bike for 20 minutes now and again and my entertainment for the duration was videotaped episodes of (yes it wasn’t very good, but it did feature 3 female lead characters, and there were lots of shots of my favourite city San Francisco) ...Charmed.

There was a special reason for watching Season  8 - the presence of a new character, Billie Jenkins , a blond, super-hot, freelance fighter-of-demons who the sisters befriend and try to reign in. Well I never saw the whole of Season 8, so never did really get the story arc (though the penultimate episode was staggeringly good, involving a massive battle and deaths of three front-line characters – which the writers when wrecked by having these events reversed in the final episode). And, fond though I was of old friends Piper, Phoebe, and Paige, it was newcomer Billie who lit up the screen and triggered all sorts of thoughts (entirely pure and platonic).

I probably last saw Billy in 2006. Then this summer  I stumbled upon The Big Bang Theory. So funny! The characters, basically 4 geeky physics researchers, are brilliant ...and so brilliantly balanced by the gorgeous Penny who lives in the next apartment. I genuinely thought it was love at first sight.

I got the boxed set, Seasons 1-5, for my birthday. A few weeks later I idly decided to check out Kaley Cuoco, who plays Penny, on IMDb ...only to find one of her alter egos was Billie Jenkins!  You could have knocked me down with a feather!

So there you go – you can fall in love with the same person twice!

(Yes this probably says more about my visual memory than anything else, but hey, it was fun looking for pictures of Kaley.)