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The AfterEllen.com Huddle: Mementos of Relationships Past

There’s an entire museum in Croatia dedicated to break-ups. It’s called The Museum of Broken Relationships and items on display include an axe, a garden gnome and a prosthetic leg.

While ours might not be as grand, we thought we’d share some mementos that we’ve kept from relationships past.

Dana Piccoli: Saying “hair” would be weird right? Not hair. But for real, I have kept a handful of pictures and letters from most of my relationships. Kind of locked away in a box that I never look at but take a small comfort in knowing it’s there. I carried a small square picture of myself and my first girlfriend in my wallet for years after we broke up. I just couldn’t bear to part with it for some reason. I think it just made me remember where I came from.

Grace Chu: I throw away almost everything, unless I look good in a photo. I keep those.

Chloe: Hoodies. I don’t even really wear hoodies (they overpower my delicate frame) but the girls I date are total hoodie lesbos. An entire row of ex-bish hoodies hang plaintively in my closet. I can’t bring myself to give them away, even the pieces filled by sad or just stupid recollections. In that sense (and others), I resemble a serial killer collecting victim souvenirs. Ho hum.

Kim Hoffman: I burned a lot of letters and photos (and even some art an ex had drawn of me) (it wasn’t that great) during a fall equinox once because I’m a weirdo witch, but it was really rainy so only 75% of that was accomplished and the rest went into the trash. It was all kinds of cathartic feeling, even though I was emotionally removed from those relationships. You know? It wasn’t like I was outside in the rain, like, “DAMMIT, fuck you!” It was just this thing I did. I do have some things saved though: because one ex gave me hand-me-downs that are too cool to toss, like tanks cut from T-shirts with the right amount of side boob possibility, (though I regret trading her my black high top Chuck Taylors for her low tops)-man, I actually had a conversation with her for the first time in three years last week about this very topic! I was trying to find a misplaced sweatshirt that has all this nostalgic meaning, and she was like, “I don’t have it, but I promise to send you anything of yours I come across in the future.” That should be a breakup creed. I had to immediately pour myself a whiskey, though I still don’t know where that sweatshirt is.

Valerie Anne: I worked at Barnes & Noble when I met the first girl I fell in love with and I still have my ID holder that is stuffed with various mementos from the job, including but not limited to the little piece of receipt paper on which she wrote her phone number for me the first time. (We weren’t allowed to have our cell phones on the floor.) It’s funny, I kept it because it used to make my heart flutter happily when I looked at it, but now on the rare occasions I do come across it (usually when I’m moving and packing all my random accumulated crap) it just makes my heart heavy. I keep it because even though it was the most my heart was ever broken, it was also the happiest my heart has ever been, and both played a huge part in making me who I am today. I don’t want to forget any of it.

Heather Hogan: I briefly dated a girl one time who had this weirdly vehement hatred of Harry Potter, a thing I should have asked about on the first date but didn’t because I just generally assume that people aren’t awful. So one day I’m at her apartment and I see that she’s got an unread first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (the UK version), just absolutely in pristine condition, and my eyeballs goggled right out of my head. I’m like, “Uh, dude.” And she’s like, “Who even cares, what a waste of paper.” And I’m like, “Oh, well, I guess we’re going to stop dating right this second.” And she’s like, “Oh. You’re one of those people.” And I’m like, “In the deepest, most firmly rooted places of my soul, yes.”

And she threw that book at me. Literally. A first edition of Harry Potter, dudes. Hurled it at me. She told me later that I looked at her like she’d thrown the baby Jesus across the room, which: worse, actually, what she did. And so I did take it. I took that book right home and promised to love it forever. But then a couple of weeks later I had a lot of guilt about it because even though she didn’t deserve it, it was actually worth quite a lot of money. So I gave it back. But if I did still have that book, that’s what I’d put in the museum, behind thicker bullet-proof glass than what they use to protect the Constitution.

That girl. What a damn Muggle.

Eboni Rafus: I’ve kept the folded, handwritten note that my high school boyfriend wrote to ask me to be his girlfriend. His handwriting was small and the pencil marks are faded and smudged, so it’s hard to even read these days. But that’s not the point. I keep it for the same reason I keep my high school yearbook and my varsity cheerleading pin: to remind myself of who I was back then although I’ve changed so much.

I plan to keep my sapphire engagement ring for the opposite reason.

Years ago, my ex-wife and I decided that when we got engaged we would exchange sapphire rings instead of diamond ones. Sapphires are the second most popular engagement ring stones because sapphires represent loyalty, devotion and sacredness. According to the internets, it’s where the saying “true blue” comes from. And to us, or at least to me, that is what marriage is all about.

Out of the blue, after only a year of marriage, my wife asked for a divorce. She said that when we met, she was broken. She needed me. But then, suddenly, she didn’t. She said that she had simply fallen out of love with me and had fallen in love with someone else.

My faith in love and marriage was shattered and soon those cracks spread to everything I believed about my life and myself. It took a lot of time and effort to come back to the surface and put all my broken pieces together but now, a year and a half later, it’s hard to believe I was ever in that dark place.

Although I learned a lot from my divorce, the core of who I am and what I believe hasn’t changed. I still believe that love is an action and a choice. I still believe that marriage is about loyalty, devotion, family and commitment. I won’t allow my circumstances to harden me. It’s cheesy to say out loud, but that doesn’t make it any less true: I can’t control what my ex believes. I can’t control what she did. But I can control whether or not I allow myself to be changed by it, and I refuse to let that happen. I like who I am.

I’m the same person I was when we picked out those sapphire rings. So although she once hurt me by saying she was going to pawn her ring, I’m keeping mine. That ring is a promise to be loyal and devoted to the people I love, including myself. That ring is reminder to remain true blue to who I am. I’m keeping my ring to remind myself that even though I’ve been through hell and back, I’m still here and I’m still the same.

Anna Pulley: I kept my engagement ring too, and I am still not sure why&mdashI even wear it still sometimes, even though I never keep anything from past relationships. There’s something really powerful about that symbolism.

Erika Star: Oh, woof. In the process of moving I just came across a photo of my ex and I kissing. Now I am the first to admit to hanging on to everything from old relationships- sappy poems, cutesy letters, mix CDs, degrading emails-no matter how bad the relationship, because I have a innate need to re-visit all of the feelings, all of the time. But this picture? It feeds into the specific temptation to look at something completely heinous and test my gag reflex, even knowing better. I just can’t resist keeping it around.

Jenna Lykes: I didn’t really have any relationships before I began dating my fiancee (I was a late bloomer- just get off my back, OK?), but I did have about a billion unrequited crushes. The one thing I saved from all those fake-lationships (aka the only thing I ever actually had from them) is my complete collection of feelings journals. Whenever I think I might be cool, I just take those suckers off the shelf, revisit fifteen-year-old-Jenna, and knock myself right back down to size. (p.s. I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who participate in

Ali Davis: I used to think I’d picked up at least one beloved author from every ex, but in my careful tallying up (Nerd4Lyfe), I realized that one of them fell down on the job. And one of the posh English girls, no less. I think the one thing I’d really kept from every ex was a new way of thinking about myself, and it was embarrassingly recently that I realized I didn’t have to packrat them.

One made me feel like a grown-up, talented writer and performer, one made me feel like just part of a pattern. One showed me the terror of realizing you’re the strong one in the relationship, one made me feel cruel, and one made me feel baffled at the mysterious depths they saw that I was pretty sure weren’t there. One made me realize I was capable of a level of anger I’d never admitted to before, and I am honestly grateful to her for that, if not for the thing that led to it.

My first real ex made me feel ashamed for being the one who wanted sex more; my most recent ex made me feel more sexy and womanly than I’ve ever felt in my life. That seems like a nicely completed circle, and makes me feel very ready for the next new way of thinking.

Lucy Hallowell: Aside from my high school boyfriend (who reminds me of the guy from Fixer Upper) I don’t have any exes either. I do, however, have some friends who might as well have been exes for all the shit I saved from them over the years.

A few weeks ago I spent half a day going through old cards, notes, letters, post-it notes, and the detritus of who I was in high school; someone willing to squirrel away any evidence of kindness because it felt so rare at the time.

I still save more shit than my wife would like (“Do you need this ticket from the time we saw Varsity Blues in college?”) but, thankfully it’s more of a pleasant reminder of things we’ve done, places we’ve gone, memories I want to keep than a need to document that sometimes people are actually nice.

Trish Bendix: I am the anti-packrat so I don’t keep a lot of things unless I feel a strong need to. I remember how painful it was to go through photos with my first girlfriend when we broke up, asking “Do you want this?” and her saying, “No. Do you?” “No.” And then throwing them away. The internet is forever, though, so there’s a lot of mementos I can’t get away from. Photos, videos and things I’ve written- they will always exist. So while I don’t want to look at them right now, or probably in the near future, I hope that some day I will be glad some of it was out of my control, and I couldn’t erase it all on impulse.

Do you keep things from past relationships?

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