On Love: ‘You never forget your first love’

Every once in a while, Sara Harding would come across her old yearbooks.

She always flipped to Rob Devlin’s photo first, wondered what had become of him and quietly sent out a prayer that he was happy.

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(Mark Gail/FTWP) - A kiss during the ceremony.

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Harding couldn’t believe it when Devlin asked her to be his girlfriend in sixth grade. He was the cutest boy in their Lancaster County school, but quiet and shy, like her. They passed notes in math class and held hands while spinning around the roller rink. He even gave her a gold, heart-shaped necklace.

Then, before the year was out, it ended. His affection had shifted to another girl. Harding returned the necklace, and they rarely spoke throughout the rest of their school careers.

After high school graduation in 1990, Devlin enlisted in the Army, married and had a daughter and son. Harding went to college, did a short stint in the Air Force, married, had two boys and divorced. She settled in Woodbridge and became a third-grade teacher and devoted single mom.

And whenever she landed on Devlin’s picture in the yearbook, she always felt something spark in her belly. “You never forget your first love,” she says. “I always kind of wished him well . . . but inside there was always a little voice that said, ‘You’re going to marry him one day.’ ”

Harding kept a log of all the guys she went out in the seven years since her divorce. She wrote down their name, occupation, how they’d met, where they went on the date and why she didn’t like him. After No. 62, a retired Navy man she dated for two months in early 2011, she decided she was finished looking for a guy.

“I was content being a single mother,” she recalls. “I loved my job. I had a ton of friends. I have two great kids. I was done.”

So when an old friend from high school, Tim Gochenauer, suggested she send Devlin a Facebook friend request that March, she demurred. “I figured he was married and I wasn’t going to touch that,” she says. “I don’t mess with married men.”

Gochenauer told her that Devlin was recently divorced and nudged Harding repeatedly to get in touch. Devlin, who spent about half of his military career serving overseas, returned from a tour in Afghanistan that spring and started receiving similar messages from Gochenauer.

Devlin remembered Harding fondly, but assumed she wouldn’t even recall his name. “I didn’t think I was anything special,” he says. But in May, he sent Harding a friend request.

She quickly accepted and they began chatting online, catching up about old school memories and the events of their lives after graduation.

Devlin’s divorce had been finalized in January and he was preparing to move from Alabama back to Lancaster County. In June he spent a weekend getting his new house ready and was making the return trip to Alabama when he asked Harding if he could stop in Virginia to meet her for lunch.

Devlin’s nerves bubbled up as he approached the restaurant. “I really don’t like talking — I don’t have lots of words,” he says. “I thought it was going to be a total bomb, where we were just going to stare at each other. But it wasn’t — we just talked and talked and talked.”