After the breakup: what do you keep?

Nat - Mamamia Tuesday 17 January 2012 1:36pm

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I went over to a friend’s place for a cup of tea the other day, only to find her standing in her room with the contents of her wardrobe uprooted all over her bed. She’d gotten most of the way through a huge spring-clean before uncovering some buried relics of her last long-term relationship and getting completely stuck.

“What am I supposed to do with it all?” she asked me as we stared at a wooden box full of love letters, all signed with her ex-boyfriend’s name, as well as several innocent-faced stuffed toys and a couple of jewellery boxes.

I was completely torn. There are no black-and-white rules about what to do with the remnants of a failed relationship. It seems too sad to throw things like old photos and letters out – it’s like discarding an entire part of your life. Besides, isn’t it nice to look back at happier times and try to remember the good memories instead of focusing on the bad?

But on the other hand, is it weird to hold onto everything? Especially when you have a new partner who might be confused or upset by the fact that you’re refusing to let go of a seemingly worthless stuffed Paddington Bear, a glass penguin and several lovey-dovey postcards (all of which are relics of past relationships that I still have stashed around my room in various places).

I can’t say I’ve ever personally gotten upset about a boyfriend holding onto items from his ex – mainly because I seem to be attracted to minimalists with very few personal belongings anyway. But this very dilemma featured in the New York Times recently, when a girl discovered a pair of fuzzy purple Eeyore slippers loitering in her boyfriend’s closet:

“Tell me why you have them,” I said.“They’re Jessica’s,” John murmured.

Jessica was his ex-girlfriend. Jessica had been his girlfriend for five years. They had lived together and had expected to marry, and still talked on the phone quite often.

Cue freak-out inside my head.

It’s not like I have never brought along baggage from previous relationships into a new one. In fact, I think it was precisely because I knew just how heavy and relentless such baggage could be that it scared me.

But it wasn’t just the here-and-now revelation of “Wow, my boyfriend isn’t over his ex” that worried me. It was the images flashing through my mind: John and I at the altar, with me wearing a white dress and the flower girl wearing the Eeyore slippers; our daughter’s birthday party, with John presenting his gift of the Eeyore slippers decorated with a big red bow; John on his deathbed, his final wish that I bring him the Eeyore slippers.

All of these questions were placeholders for the real one I wanted to ask but couldn’t because I was supposed to be mature and able to handle my boyfriend being close to his ex-girlfriend. I wasn’t supposed to be panicking and wondering if we could get a refund on our coming trip to Jamaica.

What do you do with the things you have gathered from your past relationships?