True love leaves an indelible mark. When a bike accident erased parts of Cody Bryant’s memory, he forgot his love, Haley Woloshen, reported PEOPLE. Unaware, Haley thought Cody had ghosted her. However, a surprising twist brought them back together, rekindling their romance and making them inseparable.
Cody and Haley had first met in Hawaii where both of them were on vacation: Cody with his friends, and Haley with her family. They bumped into each other at a Lahaina bar and discovered that both lived in Hermosa Beach near Los Angeles, just a mile away from each other, as Cody said in a TikTok video. They laughed at the coincidence and spent some leisure time together. They still thought of each other as strangers, and didn’t expect that their sudden encounter would turn into something “wild.” But it did end up wild. As they returned home, they started seeing each other, bonding over their mutual interests in travel and outdoor sports. Then one day, 35-year-old Cody ventured on a trip to Spain, and everything changed.
After Cody reached Spain, they continued texting. Then suddenly, the messages stopped. “We were texting after he got there and then suddenly — nothing,” Haley said. She took his no-response as a sign that he wasn’t interested in her anymore, and he had just been ghosting her, as he explained in his video.
Unbeknownst to Haley, Cody had been in a moped accident in Ibiza, where a car hit him, causing a traumatic brain injury and memory loss, including his memories with Haley. “Doctors didn’t know if I was going to live or, if I did, if I would make it out of a vegetative state,” Cody shared. “Everyone was in crisis mode.” Meanwhile, Haley, still feeling grumpy and curious, hit the button on Cody’s social media accounts and came across a post that struck her as lighting. It was a GoFundMe page created by Cody’s sister, Rachel, to raise funds for his medical bills. Haley realized she had been thinking it all wrong.
After a month or so, Cody returned to the US and started using his phone again. From the text messages he read, he realized that Haley must have been someone important to him. “I saw all the messages I had sent to Haley and I was like, ‘Whoa, I must have liked this girl,’” he said. So, he took a chance, typed “Hey” in a message, and tapped “send.”
Soon enough, the love birds reunited and started dating each other. While Cody was still partially paralyzed and missing some teeth, he felt that his relationship with Haley was not a fling, but something serious. “Some of the feelings started to bubble up,” recounted Haley. She said she started driving him to his daily therapy sessions and spending quality time with him. Their romance was rekindling but they were still discussing how to take their relationship forward.
“We talked about, 'Is this a viable time to start a relationship?'” Haley recalled saying that he was the “most lovable person she had ever met.” Struggling with both physical and psychological challenges, Cody found his solace in music. Currently, living a few blocks from each other, the couple often travels together. In March, they attended a friend’s wedding in Guatemala, followed by a summer hike in Acatenango volcano and a trip to Yellowstone National Park.
Image Source: GoFundMe
Cody thanked the donors who had supported him in times of need. In an update on the GoFundMe page, he wrote, “I am determined to continue to summit mountains like this (literally and figuratively) in my recovery.” He said that he is still in “full-time recovery mode” and is undergoing daily “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), psychotherapy, physical therapy, memory/cognition exercises, meditation, and breathwork.” Haley called this segment of their lives “an insane situation,” but it ended up making their love only stronger. "Who knows if prior to everything happened, we would've connected the way that we did," she said. Cody chuckled, “I joke that she won me over a second time.”
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.