Gwynne (left), now 38 and a producer in New York
We met in 2007, when we were both living in New York. I had just moved from Kansas and Paul was a friend of a friend of my sister’s, who I was living with at the time. He was a Brit, working for a totally shady company that went door to door around all the pharmacies in New York City. He lived in an apartment that the company rented for him and three other guys, who spent their days going between pharmacies.
Paul would come to New York on a travel visa, for three months at a time, then fly back to England for a bit, then return. We dated for a year. He was the most wonderful human being; everybody loved him and wanted to take him under their wing. He just had a way of winning them over; not in a scammy way – he was just really likable. But he wasn’t making much money, and sometimes his employer neglected to pay him at all.
One day they stopped paying the rent on the apartment and he had nowhere to live. I had just moved into my own place and I said he could live with me for the months he was in the US. He brought this family album with him. It’s mostly pictures of him as a baby, him with his mum. It was one of the only things he had with him from home and he left it behind.
The last time he left for England was the day after my 25th birthday, when we had been out all night, partying. I was so hungover that my purse was stolen, and with it my phone and his number. It soon became clear that Paul’s company had gone bust and he didn’t have a way to come back to the US unless we got married. I thought about it for a few months and decided that I didn’t want to get married right now.
We’d been talking over email and Facebook, but I called him over Skype and said it wasn’t going to work out. We were both really upset, but Paul was so sad that he vowed to quit social media so he wouldn’t have to see me – and he stuck to his word. I cannot find the dude at all. I’ve tried several times over the years to track him down to return the album, but without success.
I asked my sister to ask the friend who’d introduced us, but his number was no longer in service. I emailed an old email address and that didn’t work either. I’ve searched for his name, his family members’ names that I could remember – I even asked for advice on Reddit. It’s all come up empty. I feel so bad if I hurt him in such a way that he wanted nothing to do with social media for the rest of his life.
I have nothing but positive things to say about Paul. Dating an Englishman set me up to meet my now-husband online in 2009, six months after Paul and I broke up. Like him, Ricky is from Essex and supports Arsenal. He has looked through the album and said: “I have that same shirt.”
The album has moved with me to three apartments, and I’m determined not to take it to the next one. People have said to me, “Why don’t you just throw it away?” but these are pictures of his family – even if he doesn’t want it, his mum probably does. I’ve been carrying this with me for 15 years now, and he should have it back. This is my best shot. If this doesn’t work out, we’re throwing it away.
‘I put the bracelets on – and I’ve never taken them off’
Ron Tipan (left), now 42 and a project coordinator in Belgium
I’d been living and working in Chicago for almost 10 years. I wasn’t happy, I needed a change. I decided to quit my job and travel, and hopefully get some experience working in communications. I left the US in December 2010, thinking it would be a six-month trip. Mostly I travelled around South America, working and volunteering at different NGOs. I went to Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, then Peru. I found an organisation fighting poverty in Arequipa, in the south of the country, and immediately felt good working there; I ended up staying for three months. That’s when I decided to continue travelling for as long as I could. It was also when I met my ex. She joined the organisation a bit later than me. She was from Belgium and we’d talk English together. But it was not until she was about to leave that I realised she liked me in that way – I’d just thought she was being friendly.
It started out as a fling. We got to know each other and travelled around Peru. There were no expectations that it would be for ever, but the feelings grew stronger towards the end. I went from thinking it was just a fling to thinking she could be the one. Even I was surprised by how it developed.
I can’t remember exactly when she gave me the bracelets [recreated here by Eva Grinaway], but she told me she’d made them. I put them on my wrist and they are still there, more than 10 years later. At that time I had other bracelets, too, which I’d bought myself, but none of them lasted this long.
She went back to Belgium and I continued to travel. I think the decision to break up was mutual – the distance was just too much to overcome. Plus we were just at different points in our lives. I deleted a lot of her emails, and even unfriended her on social media, but I’ve never taken the bracelets off. They have become a part of me.
I did end up in Belgium, but not because of her. When I saw her last, on New Year’s Eve 2014, she had the bracelet I’d given her in her wallet, but she has a family now – I don’t expect she still has it. I thought about cutting mine off at one point, but then I thought: why? They’re not bothering me. They’re a memento of that time, but more to do with me than with her. Now I look at them and am reminded of when I was travelling and really enjoying life. The experience changed me in a lot of ways – I cannot imagine myself being the same person now without it.
‘This cookbook was a real staple – and found its way into my box of things when I moved out’
Tania Hall (left), now 53 and an editor in London
For 30 years, I have carted around a well-loved paperback of Mediterranean Cooking – by Lady Arabella Boxer, of all people. I met its owner when we were both in our first year of university in Auckland, living in student halls. He was English, but his mother had moved to New Zealand a few years before. We became good friends, bonding over our shared love of 80s horror films – and then boyfriend and girlfriend. Our first date was to see The Fly – very romantic.
After a year of dating, we got a place together and played house. He was a great cook, particularly of vegetarian food and Middle Eastern dishes, and this cookbook was a real staple. We were intensely in love, but 35 years later I can look back and see our lack of maturity: we were just crazy teenagers, with our whole lives ahead of us. I was the person who ended it. We had been going out for a reasonable amount of time, about two and a half years, but I wasn’t ready to settle down.
I don’t remember consciously taking the cookbook, but it found its way into my box of things when I moved out. Then I kept intending to return it, but I just found it so useful. I don’t know whether my ex didn’t notice it was missing, or if he didn’t want to ask for it back, but it’s travelled with me to the UK and back, twice, and all over New Zealand.
Now it’s falling to bits, the pages are yellowed, it’s held together with sticky tape – but it’s still useful. I don’t think I could bear to part with it now, just because it’s been with me for so much of my life, literally nourishing me. It has nothing to do with my ex: oddly, I don’t think it ever really did. So much water – and olive oil – has passed under the bridge. I’m now happily married to someone who’s benefited from this cookbook a lot. I’d be happy to buy my ex a shiny new copy.
‘A few weeks in she gave me a charm from Goa. We split up but the charm remains’
Jack Highton, now 28 and a research scientist in London
I installed Tinder in 2019 to find a girlfriend. After about three months of dating I matched with Rina. She had come to Britain because she was from Goa, which used to be part of the Portuguese empire and meant she had a European passport. She said she was Portuguese-Indian, which I found interesting and wanted to find out more. We talked about her job, at a pharmaceutical company, and about her church. She was Roman Catholic and I’m Anglican. That was on my profile as well – that’s probably why we matched.
We kissed at the end of the first date and very quickly became a couple. She gave me the charm a few weeks in, along with a fridge magnet. I’d gone on a work trip to Slovenia and brought her back some trinkets, so she gave me some she’d brought from Goa in return. I was living on my own in a student dorm at that point and I hung the charm on a cupboard handle. Our relationship progressed nicely: we went on a lot of dates and walks, and we were quite intimate.
However, because of her faith, there were limits to how intimate we could be before marriage. I understood that and was respectful – but after a few months, I started to think very seriously about the future. Catholicism and Anglicanism have a lot in common, yes, but I think her view of religion was a little more strict than mine. I was conscious that if we kept dating, then the time would come for me to meet her family and the commitment would become serious. She’d said that they had already been very sceptical about her dating a white British boy.
We both wanted the same thing: to find someone to marry relatively young. The question was: was she the right person? At the root of it, I think, there was a barrier. We talked about intellectual things like science and religion all the time, but I felt after dating her for four months that I didn’t really know her deeply. That, for me, was why we broke up. I don’t know if it came as a surprise, or if she felt the same way, because we weren’t having those in-depth, soulmate conversations.
I sent the difficult message asking to meet after work: “We need to talk.” That phrase warned her what it was going to be about. It went surprisingly well, actually. We met in a park, I brought her a box of chocolates, and I explained why I wanted to end the relationship. I got more visibly upset than she did, actually. She said she was glad we’d met up to do this and that I’d respected her boundaries around intimacy. After that, we had a long hug and went our separate ways, quite literally walking into the sunset.
I eventually returned to Tinder, refreshed my profile and started talking to Belle, who’d just moved to London from Hong Kong. We met up and there was strong chemistry straight away. We got married in July 2020 after a whirlwind romance. I lost the fridge magnet when we moved house recently, but the charm remains as a nice reminder of my four months dating the girl from Goa, and a pleasant time in my life. I think it represents the journey of finding someone to marry, trying to get to know them deeply and also developing yourself as a person: what it is you’re looking for, emotionally and intellectually. It’s the journey that led me to Belle. We hang the charm in a cupboard in the living room, on display along with other paraphernalia. Belle of course knows its story. I think she finds it quite sweet.
‘I’ve no idea how I ended up with his penknife when I’d left so much of my own stuff behind’
Katie Dore, now 40 and a sailor on a boat near Montpellier, France
I got married when I was in my 20s, young and naive. We were both working on a navy ship, that’s how we met. I left the navy and came ashore, and found my life sliding into a slot that I didn’t want it to. When you’re young and in love, you don’t address the big questions. I didn’t understand why anyone would want kids – still don’t – and he didn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t. His idea of what he wanted out of life was definitely different from mine and we grew apart.
We probably would have split up sooner if he hadn’t been absent half the time. He would go away for four to six months, come back, turn my life upside down, and then go away again. I had one life; university sailing club while he was away. When he came back, he expected me to drop all that and stay in while he played computer games in his underwear and drank lager. I eventually realised I wanted to have adventures myself. We had been together almost a decade, but it didn’t feel like it.
The divorce wasn’t the worst – we didn’t have kids, which helped – but he was so disagreeable that it became a case of just signing the paperwork and walking away. I left the house with only what I could fit in a rucksack. That was liberating: off I went, to whatever I wanted.
I have no idea how I ended up with the marlin’s spike. It folds into a penknife and is used to split rope into strands, so you can splice them. I never thought about giving it back at the time, because I’d left so much of my stuff behind.
Since then I’ve lived in a motorhome, on a boat, gone across Europe on a motorbike – all the things I wanted to do. I joined a sailing club, where I met my now-partner. He said he wanted to go off cruising and I thought: “That’s cool.”
I consider myself very lucky that we found each other. Now here we are, on a boat at the entrance to the Mediterranean, having come all the way through the French canals, planning to disappear over the horizon. It’s warm at the moment, beautiful sunshine, blue skies, clear water.
I look back on that time and think how frighteningly easy it is to be pushed into a life you don’t want. It seemed to be the harder I fought against it, the tighter the noose got. I’m determined not to let that happen again. I don’t want anything to push me back.
The marlin’s spike is quite useful on the boat, but I have thought about returning it when we make it to the other side of the planet, from Taiwan or somewhere. No letter, nothing – just the knife on his lanyard so that he knows it’s his.
‘She said the DVD would remind her of me, so I took it, and my wife and I watch it’
Mariusz Grocki (left), now 34 and a medical physicist in Nottinghamshire
We met at secondary school back in Poland, when we were both 14. I’d been asked to attend extracurricular classes in physics before representing the school in a competition. I went to the first one and it was just me and her in the classroom. I only knew her by name: she was our school’s top student. That day we met, I didn’t manage to solve any problems the teacher gave us because my hands were shaking and I was just trying not to stare at her. It was like being hit by a train – and I was kept under that train for several years.
She was only interested in me on and off. I was so madly in love with her that, when it came time to go to upper secondary school at 16, I applied for one in a different town so that our paths wouldn’t cross every day. I’d just had enough. Then one day, when we were both 18 and in our final year of high school, I bumped into her. We stopped to chat, then she asked if I’d like to meet up. We started going for walks around town. Back in school, I hadn’t understood why I felt that way around her; now I understood it was love.
One day I just decided to be honest with her. On one of our walks, I gave her a single red rose and said what I felt. She was completely silent and we turned back for home. Then, while we were waiting at the pedestrian crossing, she grabbed my hand. It was bittersweet; I’d rather have known what she was thinking.
It took her quite a long time to make a decision, then we were together for several months and went to each other’s proms. It wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t the best boyfriend but I respected her boundaries, and I often felt as if she was punishing me for wanting to be with her. I was so tormented, I couldn’t prepare for exams. It was a hard decision to dump her – I don’t think of myself as a heartbreaker – but it came down to a choice between our relationship and my mental health.
I don’t know if the breakup hit her hard because I only saw her once afterwards, and it was very awkward. She had brought the DVD of V for Vendetta to my house, but we’d never gotten around to watching it and when we met up to exchange our things, I brought it with me. She said she didn’t want it back – that she wasn’t interested in seeing the movie and she didn’t want it reminding her of me – so I took it to university.
I was about to turn 19 and due to study physics. I went to visit my future student accommodation with my brother who already had a friend living there. When she opened the door, my hands started sweating and shaking, and I couldn’t help but stare. Because of my ex, I knew what was happening and was determined not to mess it up.
At 24, she was a bit older than me, but we started spending more time together, chatting about music, cooking meals in the shared kitchen. I spent most of my summer holidays learning how to cook, to prove that I didn’t need looking after.
One night she wanted to watch a film. This was before Netflix: I dug out the V for Vendetta DVD, which I still hadn’t watched. V wears a mask for the whole film, and we made a bet on who the actor was. She guessed Sean Connery; I said Hugo Weaving. Whoever lost would have to sort dinner. I had seen Weaving in The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings a hundred times, so I was confident. Boom: sure enough, there was his name in the credits. She said, “What do you want me to cook?” I said, “No, I want us to go out for dinner.” And so I talked myself into a date.
We realised very quickly that this was it. It felt honest and open in a way that it had never felt with my ex. We got married in 2012 and our daughter is now almost seven. We always rewatch V for Vendetta in the autumn, around our anniversary, but the DVD is in storage – we don’t have a way of playing it any more.
