If the holiday of romance has you looking backwards, remembering a love you once had, a first love, instead of celebrating a romance of today or eagerly looking for the romance of the future, I ask you to limit your indulgent trip down memory lane to just this one day…
Anything longer, anything more than a fond remembrance over a carton of ice cream (shedding of tears optional) is putting your romantic future at risk.
See, we have this tendency to remember the relationships of the past through rose-colored glasses or an emotional layer of sepia tones, glossing over the reasons why it didn’t work out. And the further away in time those relationships were, the worse it gets.
Like the cultural recalling of the “good old days,” we tend to forget that those easy-peasy, lemon-squeezey relationships of yesteryear seem so easy largely because we were younger, our problems smaller. Especially when seen with the older & wiser (and somewhat world-weary) eyes of today.
But the danger of living even remotely in past romance isn’t just that we might be missing the moments of today; it’s that we are seeking simpler times, simpler relationships, setting up unrealistic standards for the relationships of tomorrow.
So feel free to enjoy or even wallow in the romantic past for the day. A day. But don’t try to live there.
Or you won’t ever be happy where you are now.
Image via Since She Left.