Why It's OK to Reminisce About Ex-Lovers

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Have you had a passionate love affair that ultimately ended, but the memories of which continue to stay with you? It doesn’t take much for those recollections to penetrate your consciousness, as hard as you may try. Yet, you’ve moved on and now are in a relationship that is both stable and secure. So why can’t you stop thinking about your ex? And doesn’t this spell trouble because you can’t?

According to a recent study by University of Kansas psychologist Ting Ai and colleagues (2022), there may be a surprising value to allowing those memories to drift upward into your daily thoughts: “Meaningful memories about an ex-partner can serve a variety of functions and could potentially benefit people’s current lives." Maybe a bit of nostalgia about your ex isn’t so bad after all.

Nostalgia’s Possible Functions

Defining nostalgia as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection toward a past time, event, or a person," the Kansas researchers propose that memories about your ex could potentially inform the way you relate to your current romantic partner. When you think about it, this could make sense.

There must have been something about that ex that attracted you to them, and maybe this is still driving your feelings toward your partner now. You also might have gained some important insights about yourself and the relationships that stick with you today.

Maybe you treated that person badly, a behavior you now deeply regret. Or maybe you were too clingy, leading your ex to decide enough is enough. Regardless of what object lessons you took away from a previous relationship, it’s still the case that your feelings were very tied up in it, causing memories about the past to be almost impossible to stamp out completely. Ai and colleagues think that you might not need to try.

Returning to the idea of nostalgia as “wistful,” the question is how happy memories could benefit you now. Such fond recollections could provide what attachment theory calls “positive schemas” that guide how you connect to your current partner.

Because attachment theory also applies to the way you conceptualize your own identity, allowing positive memories to waft back into your mind could also strengthen the ideas you have about yourself as capable of having good relationships. Such memories can also help you stitch together the various episodes in your life into one coherent story.

Testing Nostalgia’s Possible Benefits

Underlying the three studies that Ai and her colleagues conducted to test the nostalgia benefit effects is a theory that focuses on what’s called “approach” motivation. Basically, this theory proposes that the more you are motivated to seek a particular set of goals, the harder you'll try to reach (i.e., approach) them.

In the case of nostalgia, positive thoughts about the ex could have the effect of increasing your desire to connect with your current partner. They could also help you see yourself as having grown psychologically, which in turn could allow you to feel that you are someone who could “attain intimacy."

The online adult participants in these studies were selected on the basis of being in a heterosexual and monogamous relationship lasting at least one month, and also by virtue of having at least one ex-partner. The authors maintained that they needed to control the nature of the current relationship by limiting their couples to those meeting the criterion of being heterosexual, though this does become a limitation.

Turning to the procedures of this research, in the first two studies, the research team compared the effect of inducing nostalgic memories (vs. control) on perceived self-growth and relationship quality. The third study used as the outcome measures an individual’s desire to deepen their relationship with their current partner (approach motivation).

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The nostalgia inductions in two of the studies included the instruction for participants to think back on a specific time in their past with their ex and reflect on how it made them feel. Some of the responses that the research team received in asking participants about this recall included reflections such as: “I get a warm feeling in my heart for a man that so long ago saw my worth and loved me enough to make a lifelong commitment,” and “I remember this because I was so happy in that moment.”

In the third study, participants in the nostalgia induction condition viewed screenshots from the Dear Old Love website, in which people write short notes about their exes, such as “I still think of you every time I doodle a heart,” and “I will always think of you and smile when I eat a muffin.” These prompts were intended to provide essentially the same induction for all in that treatment condition because they were all viewing the same material prior to thinking about their ex.

By definition, these recollections were all positive given that they were prompted by instructions to focus on the wistful nature of their memories. These are different, then, from recollections in which participants might have felt guilty (for leaving their partner) or sad (for missing them).

As it turned out, in the statistical model using nostalgia vs. control condition as predictors of current relationship quality and approach motivation, perceptions of self-growth served a significant intermediary role. Nostalgia, then, induced feelings of positive growth through the relationship, which then affected both satisfaction with and interest in the current partner.

What distinguished the present study from others on ex-lovers showing a deleterious effect on relationship quality was the focus on positive takeaways rather than continued attraction to or even guilt about the ex. As the authors note, “Continued contact with or emotional desire for an ex-partner can be maladaptive because it can prevent people from being available and invested in their current relationship” (p. 25). In other words, focusing on past pleasant memories is different from continuing to feel attracted to your ex, or even ruminating over why things went sour.

Using Nostalgia to Your Benefit

It’s clear that a certain kind of nostalgia for your ex, the type that allows you to feel you’ve grown and matured, is what can carry over into your current relationship. But what if you are bogged down by feelings of regret, loss, and failure? The University of Kansas study suggests you take the energy you put into these thoughts and feelings and turn it into a positive force to shape your sense of personal development.

A strategy that could make this feasible is an active reinterpretation of your past relationship to shape your current self-identity. Reading back on those reflections summarized above, are there ways you can think of those little things that you still do which developed in that prior relationship? How much of what you do now can be traced back to your ex?

• Maybe you like a certain type of art that you’d never heard of before because your partner introduced you to it.
• Perhaps you always thought you would hate camping, but now you enjoy it because you had such good times roughing it in the outdoors with your ex.

In this sense, your partner directly contributed to the fleshing out of your identity. Apart from what you learned about love from your ex, you also learned about yourself.

To sum up, it’s virtually impossible to disentangle what you are like now from the experiences you had with your ex. Like everyone else in your life, your past lover helped you become the person you are today.

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