Quotations from an article on the Breakup Museum that I forgot to post:
The act of mourning [is about] what never happened rather than what did. Which is part of any breakup: grieving the enduring relationship that never came to pass, the hypothetical relationship that could have worked, the glimmering potential inside whatever actually happened.
Objects make private histories public, but they also grant the past a certain integrity. Whenever memory conjures the past, it ends up papering over it: replacing the lost partner with memories and reconstructions, myths and justifications. But an object can’t be distorted in these ways.
I grew up with the sense that a broken relationship always amounted to more than its breakage—because it might have an aftermath, and also because everything that happened before it ended wasn’t invalidated by the fact of it ending; because those memories, the particular joys and particular frictions and particular incarnations of self it had permitted, hadn’t disappeared, though the world didn’t always make room for them. To speak of an ex too much was seen as the sign of some kind of pathology, and the gospel of serial monogamy could have you believe that every relationship was an imperfect trial run, useful only as preparation for the relationship that finally stuck. In this model, a family full of divorces was a family full of failures. But I grew up seeing them as something else, grew up seeing every self as an accumulation of its loves, like a Russian nesting doll that held all of those relationships inside.
I was more comfortable mourning what the relationship had been than I’d been inhabiting the relationship itself. [...] That sadness felt like a purified bond, as if I was more connected to that man in missing him than I’d ever been while we were together. But it was more than that, too: The sadness itself became a kind of anchor, something I needed more than I’d ever needed him.
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