So your love affair that started out a grand, sweeping romantic epic has turned into something more along the lines of a horror flick.
OK, it’s not that bad. No one’s dead. But you’re sad and bitter and the last thing you want is to be reminded of the fact that you had a great love and it failed whenever you’d like to know what time it is.
You took off your watch, that watch, the one you truly loved. It was perfectly beautiful. Of the Charles Jourdan design house, it had a slim, shiny black face and a minimalist look: no numbers but four square cut diamonds where the 12 and the 6 would be. He bought it for you on one of his overseas adventures, had deliberated over it and favoured it over the white Guy Laroche.
At the time, you’d opened the red box and been overcome with happiness. How could he know your taste so well? You’d worn it day in, day out, and the reverse side of the leather strap had darkened, and your arm had a lighter patch of skin because you never took it off, ever.
But that was long ago and he has since withdrawn his love and left you with a watch that will always remind you of him: him and his extra-large collection of male skincare, him and his Dolce and Gabbana jacket, him and his Armani ties. He was European; his taste was flawless.
He bought you a scarf from Paris. He bought you a plush white tiger. His mother, when she visited, gave you salad tongs from the Metropolitan museum and an evening bag from New York City. You wish you could use these things still because she hasn’t wronged you in any way, but the feeling behind them is no longer right.
Salad tongs and handbags are nothing compared to the emotional landmine that is an engagement ring. Diamonds may be forever, but quite often, love isn’t. Tradition goes that if you’re the wronged party, you keep the ring. But what next?
Addressing this problem, a jilted man started up a website that sells on engagement rings of the sort left behind when a wedding never eventuates. It’s common: visit www.idonoidont.com to see the many bits of bling saddened newly single people are trying to offload.
Some jewellers will take the stone out of the band and reset it into some other piece of jewellery so you never have to look at a ring and remember you were crushed, you were destroyed.
With time, you can move on, you can heal, you can enjoy a new relationship with another man who treats you better than the other one ever did, who also gives you lovely things.
You can replace the items with things that carry positive connotations – an evening bag bought with a freelance cheque; another watch bought to celebrate your new job.
But still, these relics of bad loves, these ghosts of relationships past, haunt you. What do you do with them? Do you sell them and with the proceeds buy yourself something better, do you give them away, do you throw them into charity bins, do you put them away until you’ve been married for 50 years and soured puppy love seems funny, not mortifying? Or, do you just let them sit tucked away in a drawer, ticking the seconds of your life away, reminding you forever that you loved and lost?