Do Shared Memories Still Exist if One Party is Trying Really Hard to Forget?: Notes on Losing 5 Years of Travel
This one has been worming its way through my head for about a week or two now. It’s a tricky one, one I can’t quite articulate without giving too much away. I write publicly, but I have boundaries.
I need to tread carefully sometimes.
I’m going to make this one about a specific thing that happened recently, about a specific person. However, in my life, this has happened many times so I figure it’s real and not just my own current, personal neuroses.
It’s about doing stuff with someone where emotion and interaction and time are a factor, whether it be extensive travel together or shared projects or just a lot of really good times spent in each other’s company. These can be platonic or romantic or whatever a third category might define itself as. At some point, things fall apart. The center cannot hold. The usual. People go their separate way and their travels and projects and time spent together become something that happened in the past but are unlikely to happen again.
Here’s the scenario: about a week or two ago, there was a glitch on my Facebook newsfeed. My ex (who had unfriended and blocked me within minutes of our break up in Bali, two years ago) had tagged a mutual friend in a photo and somehow I saw it. I hadn’t seen or known anything he had done since then because… well, because. I didn’t feel ready to go there.
The photo was his wedding photo. From last year at this time. Right around the time I had Thwack.
You know that it’s a bad sign for a relationship that had lasted nearly 6 years, spanning 4 continents, when both parties were married to someone else within a year of the breakup.
But I was happy for him, just as I’ve been relieved for myself. We were both good people with good intentions who just weren’t good for each other. No hard feelings. Some inevitable leftover sadness, sure, but happy memories of a lot of interesting adventures together (see here and here and here, etc).
I was stupid though, and curious. After two years of adamantly not looking, I looked at his Facebook albums. We had filled a lot of albums together- Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, Morocco- and a few were still there, but any trace of me having been there had been deleted. There were a lot of pictures of beaches and Buddhas. No people. No us. A lot of the earlier albums had simply been deleted entirely.
My first thought: fair enough, new marriage, new life, sure.
Second thought: How do I now think about all of these memories, all of these years, when the other half of the memories is doing his (valid) utmost to forget them?
Do these memories still exist? Yes, of course they exist, I’m thinking about them now, but how can they be now be interpreted or processed when the one you shared them with wants nothing to do with them?
They aren’t the same.
I thought about this in the context of old friends as well, people I’d stupidly fallen out with during my more volatile years. So many places and actions and ambitions that were sliced in half when one party just said no, no more, fuck that shit. I’m outta here.
How much of a shared memory depends on both parties holding on to it? How much is lost when one (or both) decides they no longer want it?
Shared memories change over time no matter what. People take them, modify them. You get together over pizza and recount them, sharing and adding details.
It seems the hard part of what you’re saying is that there are other people who have decided they don’t want a part in those shared memories at all anymore.
They want to pretend they never existed, and so in that sense, yes, I think some of the memory is gone. When someone erases photos that you don’t also have that means they, too will eventually fade away.
It’s hurtful, and I can understand why you’d feel unsettled by it.
I’m sorry.
Leigh Shulman recently posted..Dearest Margaret: On Love and Abundance for a New Year
Thanks, Leigh. It’s life, isn’t it?
Welcome back! Though I loved your Hanoi posts, it is in the search of posts like these;the ones that make me very uncomfortable about questions in my own life; that I check your blog at least once every couple of days.
Aw, thank you! That means a lot to me. I’m never sure if anyone reads my more personal pieces so it’s good to know you do! I’ll keep at it!
It’s a tough one. In a way, the memories *have* gone, because you’ve got no-one to corroborate them. Stories change in our minds, over time, and either develop or fade away. Having someone else to talk them over with keeps them alive and (more or less) grounded. But when we forget things that happened to us, it’s part of living life and moving forward, rather than living in the past. And yes, it’s painfully shocking right at this moment, but with time it becomes less so, as we create new memories to replace or complement the ones that we already have.
Time: the great healer
Kate Bailward recently posted..Getting residency in Catania – a story
I think you are making an assumption about the other party. Facebook albums are viewed by friends, family and most importantly by the new partner. It may have been in deference to their sensitivities that the photos have been deleted. I don’t have any public photos of my past with someone I had a 6 year relationship with, but I keep them somewhere private, because the memories mean something to me. I don’t want them scrutinised by my husband or his family. Memories exist in the head and heart. I believe your memories are still valid.
Thanks. I did consider that. It’s just a bit of a shock seeing yourself vanish from shared travels.
Great post, MaryAnne, and something I’ve been thinking about too. In my case it was 22 years of memories but, because travel was “my thing” since I was a very small child, I somehow don’t think of a lot of those memories as “shared”. Yes, we went to those places together but we would’ve experienced them differently and from our own perspective. Therefore his memories would be his and mine would be mine. My India/Hungary/Sri Lanka will always be mine and his experiences/places will always be his if he chooses to remember them. Maybe that’s just a testament to how distant we were from each other anyway but it didn’t feel like that at the time. When I’m talking about places with friends and something comes up about a place I want to comment on I just say things like “That happened to me, too, when I was in ___” or “Yes, I liked ____ a lot”…because those things were MY experience and there’s rarely any need to reference who you were there with.
I am, however, getting rid of paper photos of him unless I am also in them and really want them. If I can cut him out cleanly in that case, I will do that. The ones that have both of us with our son will be kept for my son in case he wants them later but there are not that many and most are digital anyway.
Marie recently posted..Protected: What He Took
I hear you there. For me, unfortunately, my travel memories were pretty intricately intertwined with his- we were a tight-knit pair, even when things weren’t going so well. The breakup wasn’t explosive or angry or because of something specific (no cheating, no betrayals, etc), but rather a long, slow realization that we weren’t really bringing out the best in each other and were together out of comfort and habit and familiarity rather than anything else (the stuff you really need). That’s why I felt so off kilter when I found myself erased, I think. I totally understand your desire to delete and cut and cleanse after all that happened. It’s a funny topic though- and not in a haha way. Just a bit tricky and odd and confusing.