Goodbye, Nostalgia Summer (guest piece by Aimée Lutkin)

Hello,

Happy Sunday, everyone. It’s been a while. I have so missed writing to you and am looking forward to getting back to regular correspondence after completely losing my writing mojo then briefly getting it back, then losing it again. It’s been a rollercoaster of a year so far. I hope you have all been well.

Today I have a guest piece for you. I am honoured that the amazing Aimée Lutkin has written not one but two guest pieces for The Single Supplement. This is the first one. The second will go out to paying subscribers tomorrow. As some of you will know Aimée is the author of a memoir about being single called The Lonely Hunter: How Our Search For Love is Broken, which you should definitely buy or borrow if you haven’t read it already.

Here she writes about heartbreak, grief, the problem with nostalgia and how sometimes it feels like we keep living the same loop over and over again. Grab a cuppa and settle down to read it as it’s quite a long piece. Hope you enjoy it. If you do, please forward this email onto a friend who might also like it.

Paying subscribers, expect an email tomorrow with the second guest piece.

Have a good week,

Nicola

Twitter: @Nicola_Slawson | Instagram: @Nicola_Slawson

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Goodbye, Nostalgia Summer

By Aimée Lutkin

In November of 2020, I came home to New York when it was already too late to say goodbye to my grandmother. She had died of a stroke just a few months before. My grandmother was gone, but it seemed important to be where she’d last been, like walking down a street where she once cast a shadow would allow our spirits to briefly meet again. I’d been in LA for several years, but aside from that time away, the streets of NYC were where I’d spent my entire life walking. When I’d moved away, I told friends I had to go because I’d walked down every single one of them, some hundreds of times. Upon my return, at first it felt like the years away had never happened, as I immediately started trudging along those old ruts. 

Sometime in mid-June the sensation of revisiting all my old haunts and habits began to take on an uncanny symmetry with the past and then I realised: I’m in a nostalgia loop. 

What is a nostalgia loop? Adjacent to the sensation of deja vu, the nostalgia loop is a series of events that make you realize your life doesn’t always progress forwards. Sometimes, the same themes and characters and experiences are happening to you again and again, like a personal Groundhog’s Day set years apart. By the time I was vaccinated, I had started dating a man I’d first met ten years ago, when he was moving out of a room in the commune I was moving into. Five years ago, we ran into each other at a bar. He was black out drunk and I was going to move to LA within the year. He asked me out. Not knowing what to do with the attention of a very intoxicated acquaintance, I said goodnight and walked back to my table. And then, in March of 2021, we matched on Tinder and had our first date sitting six feet apart in the earliest warm days of April. 

As we dated over the next few months, we were dating other people, me very unhappily. Though it had taken a decade, I knew that he was the person I liked. Dating around felt like looking for someone I liked better. That didn’t seem fair to him, to me, or to the other people I was seeing, but it’s what he wanted so I was going along with it—that’s how much I liked him. 

On a very hot night in June, I met up with a different man named Ian who was in an open relationship. I couldn’t tell him the same thing about myself and this other guy. We weren’t in an open relationship. We weren’t anything, and that’s what I found so hard about it. Ian brought a six pack of hard ciders in his backpack. We locked up our bikes together then went to sit in the grass. As we chatted, Ian revealed he grew up in New York as well. 

“What high school did you go to?” I asked, which is the first thing two people from New York usually ask each other.

“LaGuardia,” he answered. 

“What?! Me too!” I said. Surprised by this link, we talked about who we knew, who we hung out with. He’d been friends with some of my friends, though a grade younger. One of those beloved friends was someone who had died, also about ten years earlier. Ian clearly hadn’t been close to him, but meeting someone who knew my dead friend felt like getting a visit from the beyond, like I’d been hoping for with my grandmother. 

As twilight descended, the green flare of a firefly filled my peripheral vision. It was the first firefly I’d seen of the season, the first one I’d seen since I’d gone to live in LA. The little blinking bug filled my body with reminiscences of other summers from my childhood and young adulthood, stacked one on top of the other, the memories of so many other fireflies creating a galaxy of light within their layers. 

There were only a handful rising up from the ground around us, much fewer than I recalled from long ago. That’s the problem with nostalgia: it makes the now always feel like less than what you used to have. 

Ian and I had polished off the ciders, and decided to bike to another park together. The choking heat of the day had become balmy, and the last pink-tinged clouds of sunset floated over us as we rode down the streets of Brooklyn side-by-side. Again, the sensorial stimulation of the breeze flowing over me as I soared down the road brought back the loop; for a moment, I was 26 and heading from one dance party to another before coming home for a night cap on the stoop of my commune. Once again, I could see the bright eager face of the man I was now dating and wished I was in a relationship with, except in memory he was only 23 and kind of a dork and not someone I would ever dream could ruin my day by not texting me. 

Coming back to the present, I noticed that things everywhere were open, people masked and unmasked sitting at tables or standing outside bars. And inside bars. As we arrived at the entrance of Fort Greene park, a DJ with his own portable set up was blasting techno from under a tree. Up by the monument on the hill, there were competing salsa and HIIT classes happening, and someone was setting up a microphone for a comedy show that they invited Ian and I to as we passed by. The excess of activity contained in one evening was almost desperate, a forced cheer for the hot vaxx summer we’d all promised ourselves through months and months of isolation and enforced waiting. Now we can have fun again! Onward and upward! Ian and I kissed, surrounded by other couples doing the same, relishing the chance to be intimate with virtual strangers again. 

After Ian, I went on more dates, trying to distract myself from my dissatisfaction with a non-relationship. I ended up going out with two people (separately) who went to my college, and then a guy I’d already been on a date with before but didn’t recognize until we met and took off our masks again. My life was on repeat and I couldn’t see a way out except to do more, like overloading the system would break it. As June turned to July, I kept observing the frenzied activity happening everywhere and wondered if other people were also trying to break through to something better or at least something that felt “normal.” 

It soon became apparent to me that there was no future normalcy to get to, that this summer was just the eye of a storm in which everyone was trying their best to act like they were still the same people as before Covid-19. Sometimes when things have changed irrevocably, you cosplay the past; when you were young, when the people you loved were alive, when the world still seemed like a place where safety and sense were possible. 

The break up with the guy I never really had a relationship with came suddenly. It seemed like it was my fault because I couldn’t take the fact that he didn’t like me enough to be my boyfriend, and just accept things as they were. 

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The decision to end a bad relationship instead of hanging onto it finally felt like progress, but then the nostalgia loop sucked me in again. Though I make a living as a writer now, in my twenties I worked catering weddings. While mourning the loss of someone who was never mine, I ended up bartending two back-to back weddings over a rainy July weekend, having agreed to do it for a friend who managed the venue. When I’d signed up for those shifts, it had seemed like an easy way to make an extra bit of cash, but putting on my black uniform immediately sent me back in time to the drudgery of serving people who are deliberately getting too drunk to be polite. The only difference in 2021 was that I wore a mask, and I was the only one. The wedding guests were also pretending they were in the past. 

The worst part of that wedding weekend was that I’d seen him. In the many years since we’d met I'd only run into the guy I’d been dating by accident once, that time he’d drunkenly approached me. But then just a week after our final goodbye, I saw him in the park with another woman, clearly on a first date. They were sitting on a blanket he and I had sat on together, drinking from the same pink flamingo goblets he brought to one of our first dates along with a container of spiked punch. As I watched them, wondering why the universe had made me stumble on the scene, she said something to make him laugh. 

At the wedding that night, I took a ten minute break, sitting in the empty coat check and trying not to cry as I remembered that laugh. I hadn’t approached them or tried to get a better look at her, but the sight of him going through his own loop of taking different women on the same date was so cruel. My bar manager friend leaned through the open window into the closet to check on me. 

“How are you holding up, honey?” she said, having been informed of my heartbreak as we were setting up the bar. 

“I feel like I just keep doing the same thing,” I said, meaning falling for the wrong people, but in a bigger sense, too. Walking the streets of New York, meeting figures from the past, serving martinis to rich people.

“No,” she answered. “I’ve seen you go through so many phases, where you just wanted to hook up or didn’t want to get close to anybody. And now your heart has opened up again, and you’re ready to let someone in a little bit. That’s beautiful! Don’t let it close again just because of this dude. He didn’t get it, but someone will. I promise.” 

No promises can be made about the future, ever, which is why the past is so enticing. We already know what happened, where we did our best and where we would like a do over. As much as the past clings, it’s just an illusion meant to distract you from the real work of moving forward. Even if the same things keep happening, you get to choose how you react to them and decide when it’s time to finally say goodbye.

Aimée Lutkin is the author of The Lonely Hunter: How Our Search For Love is Broken. She has written for Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire, Mashable, and more, and is the Weekend Editor at ELLE.com. 

You can buy Aimée’s book on Amazon, Bookshop.org* or wherever you usually buy books. You can also follow her on Instagram and Twitter, sorry X.

*Disclosure: I am an affiliate for Bookshop.org and have included some links in this newsletter to my store. If you buy books linked to my site, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

About me

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I’m Nicola Slawson, a freelance journalist, writer and public speaker based in Shropshire, UK. I founded The Single Supplement, which is an award-winning newsletter and community, in 2019 and have been exploring the highs and lows of the single experience ever since. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter.

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