The Lovers and Things We’ve Left Behind
Why we romanticize the people we’ve lost—and what they can never give us.
I tend to be a nostalgic person; every time but this time gets to be my Golden Age. Those were the days, as the saying goes. A photo, a movie scene, walking a certain street corner is enough to summon whole worlds I’ve left behind. But the curious thing is that these memories rarely arrive as they were. Instead they’re refined, stripped of their imperfections, and polished into something far more elegant than the truth.
This gets really evident in my relationships. Looking back on past loves feels less like retracing a timeline and more like walking through a gallery of unfinished portraits—each idealized to the point of near-perfection. These aren’t the relationships I lived; they’re the ones I’ve rewritten. I tell myself each was a connection that could have been special, if only this or that had played out differently.
This impulse to romanticize is deeply human. It’s why films like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris resonate so profoundly. Gil, the restless protagonist, yearns for a time he never lived in, convinced it was better than the mundane and often painful present. By the end of the movie, he learns what many of us resist confronting: every era, no matter how “golden,” can’t escape its flaws. Nostalgia, as Gil discovers, is a pretty little liar. But her illusions are often too captivating to resist, and we try holding tightly to her, for better or worse.
John Keats and the Eternal What If
We think about them often: figures from our past whom we’ve recast, not as people, but as possibilities. The versions of them we carry now exist only in our imaginations, untouched by the messy or dull paint of reality. In this way, I’m reminded of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a 19th-century poem I read in college. At the heart of the poem is an ancient urn, etched with scenes of life frozen in time: musicians playing ethereal melodies;¹ trees whose leaves will never shed;² two lovers forever on the verge of a kiss but always falling just short:³
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter;¹ therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;²
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal³—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
The poem centers on the allure of potential and the unrealized what if. Music, Keats suggests, is beautiful, but it’s the melodies we’ll never hear—the ones that never entered the flawed, imperfect world—that retain an imagined perfection. Similarly, the lovers on the urn will never touch. Their passion, forever unfulfilled, remains untarnished by the complexities of reality. Keats frames this as a kind of eternal beauty: “Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair.”
When I first read Grecian Urn in 2011, I admired it the way one admires a painting behind glass in a museum. I had little lived experience to draw from then. But thirteen years later, the poem feels personal and visceral. My memories have drawn an urn of their own, preserving past relationships in a state of immaculation, untouched by time or conflict. I’ve learned how to smooth away some of the rough edges, sanding down the fights and flaws. In doing so, I’ve transformed my memories into something eternal but ultimately fictional. What lingers isn’t the reality of those relationships; it’s the fantasy of what they might have been.
But that paradoxical perfection comes at a cost: what if, while ethereal, is lifeless. Like a painting of a flame, it gives you the illusion of warmth without producing actual heat. The lovers on Keats’s urn are beautiful, but that beauty is sterile. They exist only as an idea, a projection of potential, making them fundamentally incomplete.
The Cost of Living in the Past
The past has a way of seducing you with its promise. It can offer a museum version of life, curated and pristine, free of the pain or mundanity of the present. To live in the what if is to hang around in a world that never existed, one that keeps you tethered to illusions and leaves no room for what’s unfolding in front of you.
Nostalgia can create a quiet dissatisfaction, a persistent sense that the present is somehow lacking. The people around you, the fleeting joys of today, the simple comforts of the mundane—all of it feels diminished when compared to a grand, idealized moment in time.
This is perhaps the real cost of living in the past: it makes the present feel inadequate. It keeps you from seeing and appreciating what’s in front of you for what it is. Reality, flawed and transient though it may be, is alive. It breathes. The lovers on Keats’s urn will never know the quiet joy of holding hands, the nervous thrill of a first kiss, or the ache of a goodbye that feels like it’s going to destroy you. That inevitable ache is the cost of living—but it’s also its proof.
Letting Go of the Urn
I think about my exes—not who they really were, but the version of them I created in my head. And I think about those lovers on Keats’s urn—forever living in the world of almost. That is their beauty as much as it is their tragedy.
And the insight I’m having now is that life isn’t about what if. It’s messy and fleeting, full of moments of joy, and just as much, moments of intense pain. But the impermanence of what you and I have experienced doesn’t make it less valuable—it makes it more so. What happens matters because it is alive. It exists in time, with all the weight and wonder that comes with being real.
At the end of Grecian Urn, Keats writes, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” It’s a famous and cryptic line that has been debated by scholars for centuries. My take: real beauty can’t be found in the mirage of fantasy; it’s found in what actually is and was—the imperfect, the impermanent, the deeply human. That’s the truth we’re meant to live with, transient and unsatisfying as it may be. Perhaps that’s the paradox we must work vigilantly to accept: while life may rarely feel like it’s enough, that, in and of itself, is enough.