Getting Over a Breakup Is Mostly an Argument With Your Memory

Breaking up with a man is one thing. Breaking up with your memories of him is another matter entirely, mainly because your memories did not agree to the breakup.

They are still very much around.

In fact, give them a few quiet months and they may begin behaving as though they have been hired to restore his reputation.

Suddenly, the relationship is being edited.

That evening when you sat across from him wondering why speaking to your own boyfriend had begun to feel like trying to open a jar with wet hands? Gone.

The three days when he disappeared into some mysterious male wilderness despite owning a perfectly functional telephone? Reduced to a minor subplot.

The same disagreement you had seventeen times? We have cut sixteen for pacing.

But the afternoon when the two of you laughed so hard in the car that you had to pull over?

Oh, we are keeping that.

We may actually show it twice.

Memory Has Made Him Much More Charming

This is the cheeky part.

The man you were dating had habits, moods, odd little silences and days when you looked at him and thought, What exactly are we doing here?

You hear an old song and suddenly you are back in the car with him. You pass the little restaurant where the two of you had that wonderful dinner and, annoyingly, the whole evening comes along with it. Him, the table, the joke, the way he looked at you — all of it, right on cue. Someone uses one of his favorite expressions and, before you know it, your afternoon has been interrupted by a man who is not even present.

He is doing surprisingly well for a man who is not even present.

And good memories rarely have the manners to come alone. One brings another. The lovely dinner brings the weekend away, which brings the lazy morning, which brings that ridiculous private joke, which brings the kiss your memory has kept in almost perfect condition.

Soon your mind has opened a private cinema devoted entirely to the Best of Him, and nobody thought to include an usher who could say, “Madam, you have been watching the same six scenes for forty minutes.”

Memory loves romance. It has very little patience for waiting around for a text.

It adores the weekend in the beautiful hotel. It is less interested in the Wednesday afterward, when he became vague and you spent the evening trying to decide whether asking a perfectly normal question would somehow ruin everything.

That material has not tested well with audiences.

So out it goes.

The Annoying Parts Become Surprisingly Cute

Time performs another little trick: it makes old aggravations lose their teeth.

You still know he disappointed you. You have not developed amnesia. But you no longer feel that disappointment sitting beside you on the sofa at 10:43 p.m. while you stare at a phone that remains heroically silent.

Six months later, you can say, “Yes, he was inconsistent,” while calmly buttering toast, as though inconsistency were a charming hobby he picked up at university.

At the time, you were considerably less serene.

This is when nostalgia becomes especially helpful to his cause.

Remember when he brought you soup?

Yes.

Remember that birthday surprise?

Yes.

Remember that gorgeous weekend?

Very much so. It has received extensive coverage.

And of course those things count. Nobody dated him because he spent every waking hour being unbearable. He was funny. He could be tender. Sometimes he was wonderful, which is precisely what made the rest of it so confusing.

The trouble is that once the relationship is over, the wonderful parts are free to wander around by themselves.

The beautiful weekend no longer has to share a wall with the strange week that followed it. The affectionate evening is no longer attached to the morning when he went cool again.

He has improved enormously since becoming a memory.

How fortunate for him.

Then One Small Memory Ruins the Film

Eventually, something less flattering wanders back in, and it is usually not the dramatic breakup scene at all. It is something small enough that you had almost forgotten it: checking your phone for the fourth time, carefully choosing your words before asking him something simple, or remembering just how much relief you felt when he became warm again.

And suddenly you think, Why was ordinary affection starting to feel like I had won a raffle?

That is when the picture gets wider and you remember, with considerably less romance, that all of this was part of the relationship too.

It does not make the good memories fake. The trip really was wonderful, the private joke is still funny, and that kiss can retain its five-star rating. You loved him. He mattered. Some parts were beautiful.

Fine.

But with time, those beautiful parts begin finding their proper size again. A perfect kiss remains a perfect kiss; it simply stops being allowed to run a three-hour retrospective every time you feel nostalgic.

And maybe that is much of getting over someone: not forgetting him, not declaring every happy memory fraudulent, and certainly not stomping through your past trying to make yourself dislike a man you once loved.

You simply remember the whole thing again.

Eventually, the song comes on and you remember the car ride. You smile because, yes, it was lovely, and then something almost insultingly ordinary happens: the song ends and another one starts.

And you keep driving.