Accepting Our Partner’s Previous Lives and Loves

I was recently rearranging junk organizing the master bedroom closet that I share with my husband when I came across it.

It was wedged between a Mardi Gras themed bag from my bachelorette party in New Orleans and a finger painted masterpiece that our three year-old daughter made at daycare.

“It” was a photo album of my husband and his college girlfriend enjoying a beach vacation in what appeared to be the years of 3- 5 B.M.

Before Me.  

It was one of those plastic photo albums from the early 2000’s that you’d get for free at the drugstore when you had the pictures from your disposable camera developed.

So I did what any mature adult woman who’s been married for six years with two kids would do. I thumbed through the pictures. All 42 of them.

Ok, I pored over them.

And tried to not laugh that my husband thought khaki hammer-handle cargo shorts and Teva sandals were cool.

He was smiling in all the pictures and looked so happy. And so young.

While looking at the pictures didn’t make me feel jealous or insecure, it was definitely weird. The experience isn’t something I plan on revisiting anytime soon.

I know plenty of people who’ve forced their significant others to get rid of evidence of prior relationships. I even know a guy who went so far as to sneakily mail the photo album of his first wedding to his sister, who lived in another state, because his second wife found it stored somewhere in a box, got angry, and demanded that he toss it. He lied to his wife and said he threw the album away. He didn’t keep it because he cared about memories of his first wife. Instead, he wanted to keep the pictures of his grandma and great-aunts, who were now dead, having a blast at his reception.

We all have a past. And while I don’t care to think deeply about it, the reality is that my husband had a life before he met me. He had aspirations, experiences, and relationships, both romantic and platonic, that had nothing to do with me.

Likewise, I had a life before I met my husband. And I would hate to think that he would come across pictures of me at the prom with my high school boyfriend and ask me to throw them away. Or pictures of me at Spring Break with a guy I dated in college and expect me to get rid of them.

Maybe my 25-year-old self would have taken my husband’s photo album out with Tuesday’s trash and pretended it never happened. Now, my 33-year-old self would never expect him to get rid of mementos of the past. I don’t have a right to make those demands.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d feel differently if I found my husband sitting on the floor of the master closet sobbing over the photo album as he was listening to Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were” with a tear running down his cheek.

He probably forgot the album even exists. As some of the plastic pages were stuck together and the pictures were faded, it was clear nobody had opened it in a long time.

Finding the album was like driving by a car accident. I knew it wasn’t a great idea to look, but I couldn’t help myself.

And I’m glad I looked. Now I can tease my husband about his Teva sandals.

Cheers!