"We need to agree on a narrative."
"No, we really don't." (on telling the story of a relationship's end from the perspective of a storyteller)
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There is no such thing as a shared narrative.
I’m glad I still have pictures of me in my wedding dress, even though I’m not married anymore—and don’t plan to be ever again.
These pictures are such an incomprehensible time capsule to me, a flash of all my early twenties optimism. At that moment in my life, I was so enchanted with the present that I had no sense to worry over the future. I was 120 pounds (dear god). I was headed to graduate school with a full ride. I made the flower crown myself. I had a grown-up (at least more than me) husband. And I was about to drive all the way from Georgia to Nova Scotia for my honeymoon and goddammit I was gonna get to see some humpback whales in the Bay of Fundy. Life was good.
With each passing year, as I make sense of how I’ve changed, I puzzle through new information. There’s always new information— not about the relationship itself, but rather about how meaning is made from my memories. The fancy word for this is phenomenology, or the study of the nature of our life experience. Every time I retrospectively understand something about my experience in that relationship (and any relationship), I’m doing a smidgen of phenomenological processing. I’m remembering how I lived, what I thought about it at the time, and how I think of it now.
One of those memories has been eating at me lately.