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.
At first, I’m tempted to keep a few: there are photos of me in a handful of other countries, looking happy and in love. But in the spirit of decluttering my life of my romantic past, I decide to be ruthless.
“We can be weirdly tenacious and loyal in our minds over what didn’t work but had some potential,” says Charlotte Fox Weber, psychotherapist, and author of What We Want. “That tiny bit of hope can leave us weighed down with fragments of messy half-relationships, failed romances, incomplete dalliances. Like a hoarder, you might think you can assemble something beautiful out of the mess. But often it’s too messy to even see what’s there and make use of it.”
The idea initially came to me at a four-year-old’s birthday party, while speaking to Morag, the girl’s grandmother. She told me that at almost 65 and married for 40 years, only recently had she removed her exes from 30 photo albums that were taking up too much room in her house. “She was taking each photo out and saying: ‘Ohhh, this one drove a motorbike’ or ‘this one was in a band,’ then tearing them up, throwing them in the bin,” her husband Alan tells me. “I rode a camel with one of them in Africa, so I had to keep the camel in, I just tore the ex-boyfriend off that one,” Morag adds. “Alan was very good about it. He just kept asking where we were now in the albums, which I’d been keeping since I was 15, and I’d say: ‘I still haven’t met you… I’m doing the Greek islands with Costas now… a holiday romance, that one.’ He went in the bin.” Now down to 12 albums from 30, Morag has relived the memories and thrown them away.
Even if younger, unmarried romantics might not keep their previous dalliances in physical albums anymore (they’re all digital now, of course) there is something modern about Morag’s approach. More than a quarter of us are holding on to an ex’s phone number, and it’s something which dating app Badoo’s experts suggest might be holding us back from meeting potential new partners this summer.
“The reality of modern dating is that we meet far more people than any generation before us,” explains Charly Lester, The Inner Circle’s dating expert. ‘These interactions, whether it’s just a couple of text messages, or a full relationship spanning years, take up phone and head space and sometimes the physical act of deleting the messages and photos is what you need to give yourself a clean break.” The benefits, Lester says, include removing the chance of accidentally texting them when you’re drunk or lonely, or re-reading old messages and comparing them to current partners.
‘Hear, hear,’ I think, deciding to go for it like Marie Kondo in a hoarder’s house. The queen of decluttering’s philosophy is essentially a mental health technique dressed up as a cleaning method — understanding how your stuff serves you — and while people are more impressionable than rooms, imagine if deleting pictures and messages from a past life could lessen the scars?
Recently, Hinge found that 61 per cent of users were overwhelmed by the modern dating process: perhaps, for many of us, keeping past romantic encounters in our present is a pathway to burnout.
“Love-life clutter is everywhere,” according to Chance Marshall, therapist and founder of therapy service Self Space (who run regular slow-dating events for people sick of swiping). “It’s found in the accumulation of half-finished relationships scattered across different cities, dating apps and social platforms. We have access to an unprecedented number of potential partners, leading to decision fatigue and a constant fear of missing out. The abundance of choices, coupled with the pressure to present a curated version of ourselves online, can create clutter and overwhelm our love lives. Get rid of it.” By addressing the baggage, Marshall says, we create better opportunities for personal growth, self-awareness, and the ability to embrace new connections with more openness and authenticity.
Which is not to say that dusting the digital cobwebs doesn’t arrive with a sense of discomfort or guilt about letting go. ‘Although it might feel like you are losing something, try to view it as making emotional and digital space for someone or something,” says Jade Thomas, a psychotherapist and Founder of Luxe Psychology Practice. “Spring-cleaning your phone can bring emotional and psychological closure that a relationship has ended — it’s a sign to begin building your life without that person.”
In other words, it’s all about asking yourself if something — a number, a holiday photo or Instagram follower — is keeping you trapped in the cycle of going back to, or remembering, someone you know is not right for you. It’s not until I meet Morag that I consider letting these mini and major past lives on my phone truly be consigned to the past by deleting them, even if that seems a surface-level way of saying goodbye.
Taking inspiration from my new pal, I decide to start on the photos, opening the hidden folder I never look at with some trepidation and finding to my horror that it is a kind of virtual version of Tracey’s Emin’s iconic tent art piece (Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995).
Half these men are also naked. With one hand over my face I delete row after row then come across a problem akin to a camel ride in Africa with a man who is no longer relevant. Here I am with an ex in Cuba, here in Edinburgh, here in Lisbon…how can I cut them out and keep the nice picture when it’s only digital?
Having deleted at least half of the folder, which goes back to 2016, I decide to move onto text messages, a far easier a task than happy holiday photos, which I find hard to stop thinking about.
“You’d never frame a picture of a bad time,” Morag agrees. “I’ve always enjoyed looking back at good memories, but you don’t need many of them. The kids (who are now all in their thirties) enjoyed it too, asking who this was and who this was, but you have to think about what they’d like to remember when we’re not here anymore — it certainly won’t be my ex-boyfriends.”
Having been dating someone now for a month, I try to picture him sitting next to me as I Marie Kondo my own exes and struggle. Having our past lives on our phone feels more covert than keeping them in physical photo albums. Plus, we’ve discussed our previous relationships in enough detail to understand each other; I wouldn’t want to sit through a PowerPoint of his previous flings, nor him through mine.
But at the start of something new, which feels more significant than anything I’ve become involved with in three years, it seems to be the right time to spring clean.
I start to wish I’d done it a long time ago and wonder whether I’d have been more trusting that new things were going to work out if I hadn’t been so dismantled by an ex who is now three years in the past.
Surely future dating can only feel easier if we let go — and where else to start decluttering than our phones?
