I’m trawling through the hidden section of photographs on my phone, deleting with abandon, having decided, aged 33, that it was finally time to Marie Kondo my love life.
For readers unfamiliar with the decluttering guru and author of bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, her method involves mindfully looking through items in your home and asking yourself whether they ‘spark joy’ or, whether they are actually holding you back. If the latter, discard. A principle, I’ve now discovered, that can be applied to modern romance too — whether that’s deleting old photographs and numbers, binning old T-shirts, unfollowing exes on Instagram, or quitting trying to be friends with exes altogether. I spent my entire twenties in relationships and in my thirties so far have cycled between a number of fun but short-term affairs. In practical terms this means a lot of content: reams of pictures, messages, emails and even the odd letter — heady reminders of everyone I’ve ever dated, available at the touch of a button. The experience of deleting the photos is unpleasant and twofold. This one cheated on me, I think, swiping my finger across the screen to rid him from my phone once and for all. This one didn’t tell me he had a girlfriend: delete. This one only ever cooked mince: bye. This one was as jealous as Othello and had a ridiculous number of bizarre insults that flowed like lava when he was drunk: good riddance. But it’s also uncomfortable because with all of them there were great times too, and to see the pictures is to relive the good before the bleak and wonder why it all had to go so wrong. I had taken each picture because there was always hope in the beginning. And I had hidden them because that hope had fizzled into another bitter disappointment (and because nothing ruins your day like the face of someone you regret sleeping with popping up via a ‘this time last year you were…’ notification.
