Is it better to bury memories of past relationships, or embrace them?
There is a note tucked into the center console of my husband's truck that reads, with devotion and warmth: "I love you. We will get through this."
I didn't write it, and they didn't get through it. The note is from his ex-wife.
When Ben and I began dating, it was difficult for us to start completely fresh. For years, I had reserved large swaths of memory for my previous spouse's birthday, phone number, likes, wants and dreams. Now it's Ben's birthday I remember, along with his favorite ice cream flavor and go-to order from our local deli. But when I try to recite his cell number from memory, I still stumble through the digits.
Sometimes it's hard for Ben to remember, too. Once, nearly a year into dating, he casually recalled that I was a July baby (his ex-wife's birth month) and was mortified when I gently reminded him that I was born in November.
When we eloped on top of a mountain in western North Carolina, it wasn't the first time we had exchanged vows with someone we promised to love for the rest of our lives. Occasionally, the details muddy themselves; the lines blur between what was and what now is.
When we share anecdotes about places we've been and things we've done, we nudge the ghosts of our pasts to leave space for us to discover more of each other. But they are always there, lingering, leaning in.
Some parts of our lives remain more crowded than others. When Ben comes up behind me in the kitchen after an argument, I sometimes flinch, anticipating the angry, looming presence of one of my ex-boyfriends.
When I say to Ben that because he has more vacation time than I do, he should visit his family alone for the Fourth of July, his eyes betray the pain of those separate holidays that marked the slow-motion demise of his first marriage.
When I set out on what I hoped would be my second "thru-hike" of a long trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, Ben's own recollections of the hike were peppered with his first wife's presence.
"That's where I carried her off the trail because her feet were torn up from her shoes," he said on the phone when I told him I was hitching a ride into Tehachapi, Calif., ending my 558-mile section of the trail for the summer.
This blending of new experiences with decades' worth of memories from our previous relationships isn't what either of us had expected when we started dating. But I suppose that when we promised to share our lives with each other, we meant it.
After my Covid-era divorce from my high school sweetheart, I hiked the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in 2022. When I met Ben, who had completed that hike the year before, he was setting out "trail magic" at a road crossing in North Carolina during a blizzard -- usually a surprise involving food laid out for passing hikers. I was the first hiker to walk out of the woods that morning, head bowed to thick tufts of blowing snow.
His marriage was in its final throes after years of hurt. The man I was dating at the time, left behind as I hiked, was already beginning to withdraw. Ben and I talked about my divorce and how it had propelled me toward the trail. We exchanged social media profiles but didn't speak again as I completed my nearly 2,200-mile hike.
Six months later, after his marriage had ended and my relationship had collapsed, we found ourselves together again in Asheville, N.C.
"Have I got something big to tell you," he said. He was animated, jittery; I noticed the lack of a wedding band on his ring finger. It was the first time we had seen each other since that snowy day on the trail. We bought each other rounds at a nearby brewery and talked divorce.
What started as commiseration over shared trauma became hours of meandering conversation about our pasts, futures and dreams. When the brewery closed, our evening became a midnight tour of waterfalls lit by our phone flashlights and culminated with a wee-hours dinner at the local Waffle House. Over my bowl of grits, I told Ben that he must have planned our evening by reading a prompt on my recently reactivated Bumble profile.
When he asked to see it, I held out my phone, noticing for the first time the endearing way the lines formed around his eyes when he laughed.
"Perfect first date," he read. "Hike, Waffle House -- "
I smirked. "Well, this isn't a date, Ben."
When he slid the phone back with a sigh of exaggerated disappointment, I deleted the app.
He drove me back to my car, where we talked some more in the cab of his truck. When I gathered my belongings to leave, he asked quietly, "Can I make a move?"
I wanted him to make a move, to lean over and kiss me, but then I thought: too soon. "I'm not going to be your rebound, Ben," I said. "I like you too much for that to end well.
"But I can be your friend," I said, leaning over the console to peck him on the cheek.
Two weeks after he was legally separated, we started dating. Six months later, we bought a home together. Nearly a year after we bought our home, we eloped on the Appalachian Trail, 30 miles south of where we first met.
Along the way, we have collected our own memories. When we were still dating, he would meet me several times a week at my apartment's doorstep with coffee in hand for an hourlong round-trip drive to a nearby overlook to catch the sunrise before work. He was pulled over for the first time in his life when I was seated behind him on my first-ever motorcycle ride. We got away with a warning and a selfie with the cop, who was just as charmed by Ben as I was.
We traveled to Oregon to hike the last 100 miles of his Pacific Crest Trail "thru-hike." On mountaintops, we reached our phones toward the sky for enough signal to review the inspection report for the house we were buying. We hiked through a charred burn zone; then skinny dipped in an alpine lake without realizing a game camera was perched on the shore. At the end of our trip, we hitched a ride back to Eugene, Ore., at 3 a.m. when our rental car broke down.
When we bought our house deep in the mountains of North Carolina, we renovated it to host Appalachian Trail hikers, spending long nights working in a cloud of drywall dust and squabbling over the music playlist. Then, we began racking up tens of thousands of miles on remote forest service roads to pick up tired, smelly hikers and welcome them into our home.
We were living a full life together but had already lived full lives apart. As we settled into our own strange version of domesticity by running the hiker hostel, we swapped stories of our pasts while plotting new adventures.
I was surprised by the eagerness of his attention to my stories. My previous boyfriend would grow sullen when I regaled him with the tales of my cross-country travels—all of which happened during my first marriage. "I just don't understand why you can't say 'I' instead of 'we,'" he grumbled, jealous of a man who was no longer in my life.
I could have said "I" when telling those stories, but it would have felt dishonest. I couldn't wipe my divorce from existence. And the more I grew to appreciate the lessons it had taught me, the more I didn't want to. Ben didn't expect me to censor myself; and I didn't expect him to censor himself either.
We aren't offended by the existence of our previous marriages; allowing our first spouses to share in the stories we tell each other—what our dreams used to be and how they are changing—the ways in which we used to live and the ways we choose to live now.
When we say "we" and aren't talking about us, it serves as a reminder to treat our second marriage with the kind of care that understands that nothing is certain—not even solemn vows—unless you decide every day to make them so.
When I found the note from Ben's ex-wife while rummaging for a Lowe's receipt, I asked him about it.
"It's a reminder that I could lose you, too," he said. "It reminds me to be better for you. I can throw it away, though, if you want."
I haven't gone looking for it again. When I saw the note in his truck console, it was folded underneath his old wedding band.