Keep or cull? What to do with the mementos of an ex-partner

This story is a part of the May 4 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

Buried in the back of my wardrobe is a pewter gold chain with three concentric squares hanging off it. I don’t wear costume jewellery as much as I once did, back when I was 24, and thought it was a mandatory part of the uniform for every aspiring culture journalist. But the necklace was a gift from someone I loved. Even seeing it reminds me of her, how she used to make me feel.

Back when I was 24, I wasn’t exactly the best version of myself. These days, we don’t speak. Her necklace is as much an emblem of how desperately we adored each other as it is a warning of how easy it is to mess it all up. I hold it in my hand and the chain runs through my fingers like sand. It seems to weigh nothing.

Not to sound too peculiar (or macabre) but I’ve always held onto mementos of ex-partners. This isn’t exactly something you’re instructed to do when you’re an adolescent, feeling out the world of dating and the buzz of love for the first time. If anything, the literature – in my case, late-1990s teen movies – advises against hoarding these keepsakes in favour of slashing and burning anything linked to paramours past. That’s never been my style. Instead, I prefer to surround myself with ex esoterica. I have Valentine’s Day cards from 2002. T-shirts. Paintings. Records. Antique furniture. A set of good knives. And fancy notebooks. So many notebooks.

I started dating at about 13 – a walk around the park, monitored by her mother, only hand-holding allowed – and I got married at 33. That’s two decades of accumulated flotsam from my varied exes, some of which is boxed up in my childhood home. Others, like the Weber Baby Q on my balcony, remain hidden in plain sight. A psychologist would likely recommend I let these items go. So would Marie Kondo. Clutter is bad enough without it also being emotional.

This scenario is less likely for those of my parents’ vintage, a significant number of whom were already hitched in their 20s. Perhaps they had one or two serious partners before they tied the knot – unless they were my mum, who by all accounts wore a splendid trail of broken hearts as she strode down the aisle. They would have necessarily accrued less stuff. By 27, the age I was when the necklace gifter left me for the second time, Mum was already pregnant with me.

By contrast, the generation beneath me is now fully online. Some of their most treasured keepsakes are texts, screenshots and posts to the grid. Their reference points are more immediate and literal. Which leaves us Gen Ys, the half-and-half demographic, who came of age romantically just as once-tangible things, like music or letters, were beginning to evaporate. Maybe that’s why we cling to these tokens of past love affairs so tightly.

“Ex-” is an unforgiving prefix. Phonetically, it connotes the letter itself, like we are committing wholly to crossing a person out of our lives. It doesn’t matter if the “ex” precedes “boyfriend”, “lover” or “wife”, the insinuation is the same. But those we love, or loved, cannot simply be reduced to a benign mass, something to be surgically extricated after which we continue on as if we never met them. All relationships have an impact on us, including the ones that don’t last. The physical items that litter our love stories often end up functioning as signposts, guiding us toward richer, more nuanced memories. The pewter gold chain is not just from someone, it is about someone. It is also, inevitably, about me.

It’s true that I have kept a great many things from those who were once the most important people in my life. But the things that mostly stay with me are vignettes; VHS rewinds of past relationships that conveniently occupy no tangible space. Hunting down fresh mint for a watermelon salad. Discovering a Texan troubadour named Ben Kweller. Learning French via a box set of CDs in the car. Fresh flowers from the market. Crying in the street in Paddington. Buying and losing the same sunglasses. Smoking on the piazza in Florence at sundown. Writing each other long, smudged letters. Being nasty for the wrong reason. Pet names. Being introduced to their brother. Introducing them to my sister. Throwing tomatoes in the ocean to make them saltier.

Now I’m a Millennial with a small child who lives in a small apartment. The place is already jammed full of mementoes from my last four years of marriage, not to mention toddler toys and no less than two haphazardly arranged work-from-home stations. There is little room for old trinkets and talismans, which I have slowly and privately begun to divest myself of. It forces me to delve into my grey matter, where the stories seem stronger, conversations more vivid. It feels like I could write them all down for posterity. Get a new perspective on the past.

After all, I still have a lot of notebooks.

Jonathan Seidler’s novel All The Beautiful Things You Love (Pan Macmillan, $35) is out now.

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