Last April I attended my ex-partner Donna’s wedding. Whilst sipping our drinks in the sunshine, a straight friend of hers leaned in to me conspiratorially and said, “It’s really great that you’re here, Rosie”. I was just about to reply, “Great that you’re here too!”, when I realised that she wasn’t simply greeting me. She meant something else. To her, it was a pleasant surprise to see former lovers genuinely wishing one another well rather than waging a bitter war.
Yet, to me, it’s always been the thought of not keeping an ex close that I can’t fathom. Why would we want to erase our past loves, as Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet’s characters attempt to do in the film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind? Surely to do so would be to erase our selves.