Getting vulnerable, intimate, and allowing yourself to form an attachment to someone is a major event for your mind. Mostly I think it’s because I accepted that this is what minds do when something major happens. I’ve never seen it as a sign of not being ready to be with someone else, and rarely have I tried to get rid of the memories. I’ve generally been accepting of thoughts, memories, or dreams of past relationships popping into my head. Sometimes my mind would wonder what it would be like if it the relationship had worked out. Sometimes they would just be memories, triggered by going to certain places or someone asking, “Have you ever been here, done that,” etc. Some thoughts would be re-doing the past-how I could have handled it, what I should have done, what could I have done better. “Why did that happen? Why did I do that? Why did I put up with that for so long? Why did I go back to him?”Įssentially, these thoughts seemed to be focused on the question “What was wrong with me?” Others would be about an ex and all his decisions and choices-essentially asking “What was wrong with him?” The thoughts would often take the form of self-recrimination or sense-making. In my case, I had daily thoughts about a couple of old relationships for about eighteen years. Some people are frightened or confused by the thoughts, memories, and dreams that occur, as they think remembering on old relationship means they’ve made a mistake in their current partner choice or that they haven’t moved on. Who wouldn’t want to be able to mentally exorcise a person who is associated with a painful and confusing time of your life? It’s as though they want them stored away in a box in their mind that they never have to open again. They want their ex-lovers out of their heads forever, relegated to a dark and distant part of their minds. If you’re lucky they’ll be sweet, but sometimes they’re sad, hurt, confused, or angry dreams. It seems whether you stay together or not you’ll likely be in each other’s minds for quite some time in the form of thoughts, memories, or dreams. I’ve had my own journey with all of the above as I traveled toward finding a life partner. I’ve had these conversations with people from all age groups, including people in their seventies. Over the years I’ve talked to a lot of people about that one love, the one who got away, the one who it didn’t work out with, the one with whom the timing was bad.
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” ~Jon Kabat- Zinn
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