Can a password bring two people back together?

In 1993, when she was twenty-two, Maria T. Allen made a password from her summer crush’s name, an autumn month, and the goddess he had compared her to when they first met. The fling ended, but the password endured. Eleven years later he found her through Classmates.com, and after several years together they decided to marry.

Before the wedding, he asked whether she had ever thought of him in the years between. “About every time I logged in to my Yahoo account,” she said, and told him her secret. He had the password inscribed inside his wedding ring. The journalist Ian Urbina called passwords like hers keepsakes: “like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.”