What to Know
Little House on the Prairie star Karen Grassle’s love story is giving people hope. Celebrity relationships are pretty notorious for their drama that plays out in the public eye, so it’s nice to sometimes read a story where things just… work out in unexpected ways. Karen, who is now 83 years old, fell in love when she was 19. But she lost touch with the man she was in love with, and in many ways, her life was just beginning. As she told People, she “was just starting [her] life in the theater.” It would be fair to assume that their romance was something of the past. Even if they were to reconnect, what are the chances that they’d still share the same feelings for each other that they did more than 60 years ago?
But anything is possible, and Karen is now happily dating the man, sculptor Robert Gove, once again, per People, all because she decided to email him 60+ years after they fell in love.
They reconnected because of the 50th anniversary of Little House.
Karen played Caroline ‘Ma’ Ingalls on the show from 1974-1982. She was invited to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the show in Monaco for the Monte-Carlo Television Festival. It occurred to her that she could reach out to her long-lost lover in Carrara, Italy while there — just to see what would happen.
“I looked at a map and I saw that Carrara was just down the coast, and I thought, gosh, well, maybe I could go and visit [him] after all this time,” she told People. Obviously, the chances of something like this working out seem quite slim. After all, Karen and Robert had lost touch many years before, and she didn’t even have his contact information.
But love truly does work in mysterious ways, and somehow, Karen found her way back to her teenage sweetheart.
She reached out via email — and he responded.
Speaking to People, she explained, “I was able to get an email, which wasn’t easy at first. I said, ‘How would you like a visitor?’ And he was enthusiastic.” (Moral of the story: just hit send?) The fact that they were able to reconnect is pretty incredible in itself, but what’s even more amazing is how they still felt the same way about each other after all these years.
“It was quite a surprise to find how close we felt when we saw each other,” Karen told the publication, adding that they “fell back in love” after meeting up. Now, she plans on spending more time in Italy so they can be together. She even got “a nice little apartment” in Carrara so she can live in Italy part-time while spending the rest of her time in the United States.
Reaching out after all that time is honestly a bold move, and it’s great that it worked out so well for Karen.
