Old love letters

[ohtobecleo]

I'm curious, does anyone keep old love letters?

I had a couple of glasses of wine this evening and was browsing old emails. I had filed away all the emails from my previous relationship which ended very painfully nearly 3 years ago (I couldn't bring myself to delete them as it was a very special relationship). I've avoided reading them up until now, but in the past few months I've started to feel like I'm properly over him so curiosity got the better of me tonight.

I can't work out if it was a good or bad idea to read them. It's brought some of my feelings back up (nostalgia about how in love we were) , and it's made me see him in a different light (resentment because he hurt me really badly at the end).

Does anyone else do this or do you find that destroying all correspondence is healthiest?

I think I may have old loveletters but they re about 20 yrs old now. They are in the loft somewhere. Even though these people broke my heart and were at times very hurtful, I still look back and can separate the person from their actions. On the other hand, pics and any cards from a formerly abusive partner hv been shredded and binned. It may be I never came to terms with all that. I don t really care. I dont actually want any memory of him being in my life at all. I think it depends on the degree of abuse actually and if you think that, as people, they are essentially okay or just bastards

I think it depends how you feel/felt about the relationship. Not how it ended as such, for a beautiful relationship can end in the shittiest, most horrible way.

I have chucked letters/photos from some relationships, but I have, in particular, 2 letters and a handful of photos from a relationship over 25 yrs ago that I would run into a burning building for.

I am a hoarder, and as a result of always having kept detailed diaries am the one friends come to and say: you remember such and such, what happened when....? And out come the diaries....I was really surprised last summer when meeting up with old uni friends- I had taken some of our old letters (really funny stuff, not all angsty about relationships) and we were literally crying with laughter as we read them all....Then one of my friends said she had recently been back to her Dad's house and chucked every single letter/photo/diary from before she met her husband and the father of her kids. I found that odd, and a little sad, she said she didn't want her children to find out what she was like before she met their father.

Each to their own, but I want my daughter to know that her aged boring old mammy was also capable of laughing, crying, drinking till she was sick and falling in love so hard it hurt for months....

Yes lottie, I think you're right. The ones I kept were from a special relationship, I was hurt by the nature of how he dealt with the break up but there was no abuse. My exH on the other hand.....it was an EA relationship and I have nothing that I kept from him (except my beautiful DS).