When love ends, we may hear a familiar consolation from well-meaning friends: at least you experienced real love once.
Yet in the midst of heartbreak, this can feel like very thin comfort. The pain isn’t that love never happened – it’s that it no longer exists in the present. We tend to believe that only what is happening now can bring us comfort. The past has become useless to us.
In reality, memory is one of the mind’s most remarkable abilities. With the right perspective, memories of a stroll along La Seine or a perfect salad in Puglia could become not an enemy of heartbreak, but a remedy for it.
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