Why We Romanticize People Who Weren’t Good for Us

There are some people from our past who seem to have a strange ability to stick around. Years can pass, and then a song comes on, or you remember a place you used to go, or you see an old picture, and suddenly you're thinking about them again.

Sometimes I think about someone I dated when I was younger and wonder why I missed him for so long. He wasn't good for me. I know that now, and in some ways, I knew it then, too. But that knowledge didn't make it any easier to let go. When the relationship ended, I missed him for years.

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand why.

The person I thought I missed

The strange thing is that when I look back on that period of my life, I don't actually remember being unhappy. I remember being incredibly happy.

I was young, thin, tan, and excited about my future. I had energy. I was excited about who I was becoming. I had a best friend who wanted to spend time with me, and for the first time in my life, I felt like someone genuinely wanted to know me.

That part is difficult to reconcile with what I know now.

He hurt me in ways that I couldn't fully understand at the time, including sexually, and eventually our relationship became something I knew I needed to leave behind. But when I think about those years, my brain doesn't immediately pull up all of that. It pulls up the music, the clothes, the inside jokes, the places we went, the feeling of being young and hopeful.

It pulls up a girl who was happy.

And I think that's where romanticizing someone gets complicated. We don't experience our lives in neat categories. We don't keep separate memories for the person we loved, the way we felt about ourselves, the friendships we had, the things we were excited about, and the life we thought we were going to have. They all happen at the same time.

Eventually, one person can become associated with all of it.

When a person becomes a period of your life

He was my best friend, and I genuinely enjoyed being around him. That matters to me when I think about this now. I don't want to rewrite the relationship as though every moment was miserable just because I know now that it wasn't healthy.

I had grown up learning how to be independent very early. I was expected to be mature and self-sufficient, and I became pretty good at it. But being capable of taking care of yourself isn't the same thing as feeling cared for.

So having someone who wanted to know what I was thinking, wanted to spend time with me, and seemed genuinely interested in me meant a lot. He was the first person in my life who gave me that feeling, and I think I attached a lot of meaning to it.

Maybe that's why it took me so long to separate him from the happiness I felt during those years.

For a long time, I also had some version of the "what if" fantasy. What if he eventually grew up? What if he realized what we had? What if he finally understood what he'd lost?

Looking back, I don't think I was necessarily waiting for him to become the right person for me. I think I wanted him to see what I saw in myself. I knew I was worth loving. I just couldn't understand why he couldn't see it.

Eventually, I had to accept that he didn't have to. He didn't have to come back and validate my worth. He didn't have to understand what he'd lost. He didn't have to become the person I thought he could be for me to move on.

Knowing someone wasn't good for you doesn't erase what was good

I think we sometimes make this harder for ourselves by believing that if someone wasn't good for us, then we need to decide that the entire relationship was bad; but people aren't really that simple.

I've loved other people who I knew weren't right for me. Loving someone doesn't automatically mean they are good for you, and realizing that someone isn't good for you doesn't mean you never loved them. Both things can be true.

I can acknowledge that someone hurt me without pretending I wasn't happy when I knew him. I can remember loving him without believing that love means we belonged together. I can miss having a best friend without wanting that particular person back in my life.

And maybe that's the distinction I didn't have when I was younger: missing someone and wanting them back are not necessarily the same thing.

Sometimes you miss the person. Sometimes you miss the life you had when they were around. Sometimes you miss the version of yourself who existed during that time. And sometimes you don't even realize which one you're missing.

So what am I actually missing?

I think I'm still figuring this out. I know that I miss parts of who I was then. I miss how hopeful I felt. I miss being excited about my future. I miss feeling beautiful and healthy and full of energy. I miss having a best friend who I could spend hours with doing absolutely nothing.

I miss joy.

For a long time, I assumed that because he was so closely tied to those memories, missing them meant missing him. Now I'm not so sure.

Maybe that's one of the stranger things about growing up: eventually, you have to go back through your memories and figure out which parts of your past actually belonged to other people and which parts were yours all along.

I don't need to decide that those years were secretly terrible. They weren't. I don't need to be embarrassed that I loved someone who wasn't good for me. And I don't need to stop being grateful for the parts of that time that made me happy.

What I do need to figure out is how to have those things again without needing the person I associated them with.

Maybe that's what we're really doing when we romanticize people who weren't good for us. We're trying to find our way back to something we felt when they were around, without realizing that the feeling might have belonged to us in the first place.