Relationships
The Love That Exists in the Archives of Our Heart
If we reimagine a lost love, we'll notice that somewhere in us, it still lives.
Posted February 27, 2025 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- The love we experience, however transient, has its own unique "empirical" immortality.
- Even a so-called "lost love," if reimagined, still exists—and even vibrates—deep within us.
- Intimate connections both shape and reshape our personality.
In common parlance, we speak of love that dies, love that cannot survive the passage of time. And this expression doesn’t even include the mental and emotional changes we go through after that love originally took root.
On another level, though, all the love we experience is undying. It may be limited to a time and state of being that has come and gone. Still, given that nothing lasts forever, its existence, however transient, has its own “empirical” immortality.
It might also be seen as a private—versus public—record of all that’s contained in our most personal “dictionary” of experience. In a lexicon made up entirely of what we’ve gone through, our lives manifest subjectively eternal truths.
Granted, there’s a certain variability and impermanence about romantic love. To whatever degree, such a powerful feeling necessarily waxes and wanes.
Moreover, the process is cyclical: As darkness follows light, so does light follow darkness.
Even when we think about a “lost love,” if we allow ourselves to fully re-imagine it, we’ll notice that somewhere inside us that love still lives—quite as real as it was originally. Consummated or not, integrated or not, in our archives it continues fervently to vibrate.
So regardless of whether something endures indefinitely, its lifespan doesn’t itself determine its personal, subjective significance or durability. It remains an immutable, unchanging fact in our reality. As an introspective mirror, it reflects back to us whatever we still perceive in it.
In addition, love embodies not just joy but pain and risk too. In fact, the emotional dependency inherent in loving another always involves a certain amount of suffering, for when the other person is absent, it pains us not to be able to reexperience the joy they brought us.
Intimate connections shape, and reshape, our personality. And it can be said that we have not just one but multiple personalities because each has its own distinct presence and validity. And no single personality is any less valid than another. That’s why personality is truly kaleidoscopic.
If our various connections are each in their own way precious, it’s because they’re finite. As such, they’re similar to the line in Shakespeare’s 73rd Sonnet: “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
Our very identity is shaped by our memory of how others have touched us. For it’s in our connections that we experience personal meaning. And our human vitality derives from our perception of ourselves as intrinsically related to others.
© 2025 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All rights reserved.