Hey everybody, this week I'm sharing a vault episode for my friend Margo.
Let me explain.
When I started Love Letters, the advice column, many years ago, there was this play about famous advice columnist Ann Landers.
And the local theater company putting on this play wanted me to come and talk about advice columnist work now for special programming for one night of the production.
I think it was at that event that I learned that Ann Lander's daughter, Margo Howard, who had her own advice column, which was syndicated, lived not too far away from me.
This was very intimidating to me at the time, because Margot Howard came from the most famous family of advice columnists.
Her mom was Ann Landers, my favorite, and her aunt was Dear Abby.
If you ever want to learn about the history of those two women, do some searching.
It's quite interesting.
There was a significant sister advice columnist rivalry.
Anyway, not long after helping out at that play, a friend introduced me to Margot in real life.
I suspect she was in her 60s or maybe early 70s at that point, and immediately I could see she was this wild, fancy force of a woman.
Absolutely no filter.
Despite my being a little scared of her, we liked each other quickly.
Her big personality reminded me of my sister, but quite different.
Margot was from this elite community, and she knew all these famous people, and she'd been married to a TV actor.
She would take me to fancy restaurants where I felt like a person of the world.
Margot was very open about the fact that she'd been married four times.
And she thought it was very amusing that she and I were both giving other people love advice as our day jobs, despite her three divorces and the fact that I was not dating at all.
At that time, I was dating my television and did not want to spend much time on romance in general.
Our friendship became very occasional lunches, and once she retired and moved to Florida, we would send these long emails, sometimes about the world and our lives.
Not to be cheesy, but they felt like love letters.
This is where I have to say that last month, Margot died.
It was a surprise, but it also wasn't.
She was 86.
So now, knowing that, I would like to share the Love Letters episode she was on.
We'll play it now, and then I just have a few thoughts for you at the end.
Please enjoy Margot, who is larger than life, and as you'll see in this episode, was good at moving on.
This was part of our entire season about getting over breakups, and this episode in particular is about the things we keep and what we give away.
From the Boston Globe, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
I was always the person who decided to leave, so I wasn't laid low with unhappiness.
I just always picked myself up and moved on.
I think kids have a really crazy idea that it's going to be a red-hot romance for 45 years, and it isn't like that.
Like, what's the longest red-hot romance anybody can expect?
Three.
Okay, okay.
That answers the question about that marriage.
This is Margo Howard.
If you don't know her she's an advice columnist herself.
She was dear Prudence, then dear Margot.
She's also the daughter of the most famous advice giver of all time, my hero, Ann Landers.
Margot has been married four times, so she knows a thing or two about breakups.
This is really wonderful, an advice columnist with four husbands.
Recently, I had the chance to hang out with Margot in Sarasota, Florida.
As two advice columnists hanging out in the sun, we had the chance to talk about a million things.
But one of the most important conversations I think we had when it came to breakups was about mementos and relics.
All these important objects we collect during a relationship and what happens to them after the relationship ends.
Margot tells me that after one of her divorces, freedom was actually more important to her than any of the objects left in her possession.
When I unloaded the starter husband, I really bought my way out of that one.
There was a very valuable art collection.
I said, you take it.
I took a dive on all the arrangements, which was a very subtle FU message, like, it's worth anything to me to be rid of you.
Then, when she left husband number two, Margo parted with something even more valuable.
He was just so destroyed and distraught, I wanted to make him feel better, so I said, you can have the dog.
He was very fond of the dog.
And then when I told the children, they said, Mother, that's our dog.
I said, look, we have to do what we can to help him through this.
And he did take the dog?
Oh, yes.
But I thought it was the least I could do.
This is one of the many reasons Margo is my idol.
She can move on right when it's time to.
Unlike me, and maybe you, she doesn't spend years ruminating over what might have been.
The rest of us?
We're more like the guy who needs the dog.
Think about it.
When you break up with someone, so much evaporates, like overnight.
Love.
Daily text messages.
A shared Hulu account so only one of you has to pay for The Handmaid's Tale.
All gone.
Just like that.
But then there's that other category of things, special things, things that retain some precious meaning or assume a completely new meaning after the breakup.
All this season on the Love Letters podcast, I'm exploring breakups and how to get over them.
After speaking with Margot, I started thinking about the stuff we throw away, and the stuff we just can't let go of.
What are we supposed to throw out?
And does keeping stuff delay us from moving on?
It makes me think of things I've kept after my own breakups, and in particular, one very special t-shirt.
So I haven't received that many cool gifts from boyfriends.
I'm not whining here.
Honestly, it speaks to how well they've known me.
I'm not a jewelry person.
I like gifts that are experiences.
And food.
I love food.
So all you have to do is get me a gift certificate to the Cheesecake Factory.
But years ago, one boyfriend gave me a t-shirt.
I'll call him Patrick.
To be accurate here, Patrick started by loaning me his T-shirt.
It was a Minnesota Timberwolves T-shirt, and it was huge on me.
I could wear it like a dress.
When I told him how comfortable it was, I think I was hinting, he told me I could keep it.
The gift probably didn't mean that much to him, but to me it meant everything.
I felt like I had been given like a letterman's jacket.
I didn't even know what kind of sport the Timberwolves played.
Of course, after we broke up, that same t-shirt haunted me.
I would wear it to bed and cry and blow my nose in it.
Or not wear it, and then I'd cry harder.
A friend of mine, a very good friend, decided that I shouldn't keep it.
He took it from me, and as far as I know, because I begged him not to throw it out or burn it, he put it in the basement of the apartment I was renting.
He literally hid it from me.
It's possible it's still down there.
Or maybe he was lying to me and it did immediately go to the dump.
But here's the thing.
Now that I'm way over that breakup, I wish I still had that t-shirt.
It was a way to remember something great I had with Patrick.
And I think we should hold on to things that remind us of the good times.
Sometimes, souvenirs from our relationships start out meaning one thing, but then end up meaning something completely different.
That's what happened in this next story.
How would you like to be referred to?
Why don't you call me Jack?
Jack's 25, lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and is a creative who works in media.
It started back in very late 2015 with a person who was visiting the United States from Ireland.
He was visiting family.
And we met on a dating app.
We met on Tinder.
And I think we maybe had talked for like a week before we had started to meet up.
The first night we met, it was actually a couple of days before Christmas.
They arranged to meet at a bar, and Jack says the connection is instantaneous.
Like, I had never experienced an attraction like that before in my life.
Like, it was very, kind of, it just hit me like a ton of bricks.
Did he have an Irish accent?
Yeah.
Of course he did.
You know, I'm a sucker for any of that.
And it was just like, it was good.
They have some drinks.
They have some more drinks.
They go back to Jack's apartment.
He's infatuated at this point.
I think we were just laying on my bed or something.
And we were talking about where we wanted to go.
I had mentioned that I wanted to travel.
And we were talking about places that I wanted to go.
And I...
I told him that I wanted to go to Paris.
And so maybe about five minutes later, as he's getting changed, he pulls a euro, a five euro note out of his wallet and wrote on it.
The note says, for coffee in Paris.
To Jack, this is a promise.
One day they will sip espresso together at a cafe in the Marais.
A moment like that, like I, I was just like, I was floored.
Like I was, it was completely just like out of the blue.
Like, really?
Wow.
They spend the next several days together until it's time for the guy to go back to Ireland.
After that, they stay in touch on the phone for a few months.
They FaceTime.
At some point, the guy tells Jack he's about to take a trip to Kenya.
And this is when Jack gets ghosted.
The guy goes on his trip and stops communicating with Jack completely.
I mean, I was racking my brain as to what could have happened.
And then I saw photos on social media of him enjoying his trip.
And...
After he came back, I texted him a couple of times just saying, you know, can we talk?
What's going on?
I want to hear about what you're thinking.
And he never got back to me.
Tell me how you felt emotionally.
I was pretty gutted.
This was also during a month-long span.
He left the country at the beginning of January, and by the end of January, I had lost my job and I had to move into a new apartment.
You know, I was understandably pretty upset.
Depressed over it.
It was the last thing that I could have possibly lost at that time, and I lost it.
At this point, though, Jack still holds onto the euro note.
A year goes by and still no word.
Jack can't quite shake what happened.
His friends push him to get in touch with a guy that he should demand some kind of answer.
I texted him and I said, basically, listen, you know,
I deserve to know what happened.
I deserve to know why you did what you did.
And, you know, I'm not necessarily mad at you anymore, but I do need some sort of explanation.
And about probably 12 hours later, I got a text.
Explaining that he was scared.
You know, he was very...
I mean, as remorseful as you can get via text, it sounded like it was an apology.
It sounded very...
It sounded genuine.
At the time, it was enough that I could just be like, okay, I guess I can live with that.
Some more time passes, and Jack still has the euro.
Still hasn't heard anything, which is why he takes a big risk.
The ex at this point is living in London.
Jack is headed to London on a trip.
He proposes getting together.
It works.
He replied, and he said, you know, absolutely.
I'd love to see you.
You know, why don't we, you know, once you get here, we can take it from there.
And I said, okay.
And so I got there, and we had connected.
We had spoken.
We had ended up speaking on the phone for the first time in over a year and a half.
It was the most...
Surreal thing ever to hear his voice again.
It was exactly like I remembered it.
The guy says he works in a restaurant right near where Jack is staying and that they can meet there for drinks.
His ex even makes a special reservation for lunch.
Day comes, you know, I can kind of replay it in my head, the moments of sort of getting ready and I remember taking the bus and then getting on the tube.
You know, it's like that Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day.
I can just replay it in my head, that two-hour span.
I am more nervous than I've ever been for anything in my life.
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So Jack gets to the restaurant.
He asks for the table in the guy's name and sits down.
He's beside himself with excitement.
I sat at that table for an hour and a half.
He did not show up.
I had probably gone through two drinks at this point because I was just sitting there like a fool at that table in front of people that he worked with for an hour and a half waiting for him.
And after a while, you know, maybe after another 30 minutes, I was just like,
I've been played again, haven't I?
I had never felt more embarrassed in my life.
This is something that only happens in movies.
So after that lunch that never came to be, did you ever reach out again?
Yeah.
I, you know, I was feeling a little ballsy.
And I was, you know, kind of just fired up in terms of emotion.
And I did something pretty out of character.
And I, you know, I just kind of sent this one last, like...
You know, manifesto text.
Will you tell me what the text said?
I need closure at this point.
I know.
Don't we both?
I won't read the whole thing because it's a very, it's a pretty long-winded text.
But, you know, I basically was just like, you know, listen, given your track record, I shouldn't have been surprised as to how today turned out.
I just wanted to let you know that I hope that you never experience the disappointment, the embarrassment, and the anger that I felt waiting for you at that table like an idiot.
Jack never hears back.
But at this point, he really doesn't need to.
When I spoke with Jack, we talked about his brief, dreamy relationship and how it had changed.
And I wanted to know more about the euro and what it meant to him now.
Why did he keep it?
Do you have the note with you now?
I do.
Can I see it?
Yes.
I feel like I'm touching something very valuable and I'm stressed out.
Oh, it's a euro.
Yeah, I would have kept this too.
Yeah.
It was quite possibly, still is, the most romantic gesture that anyone's ever done for me.
Do you think he'd be surprised to know you still have this $5 euro in your wallet?
You know, I'm not sure if he would be surprised.
Some part of me doesn't think he even remembers giving it to me.
But I feel like if he did know how much it meant to me, I think he might be a little surprised, yeah.
Jack says there were times he thought about ripping it to pieces, or throwing it away, or feeding it to a paper shredder.
But he's glad he didn't.
I'm sort of glad he didn't.
This crumpled, colorful bill with this romantic declaration written in thick black sharpie on it?
For Jack.
It just looks like the kind of thing you'd keep.
What do you think it means to you now?
You know, I think...
I think it means that...
I'm not holding out hope anymore that we'll ever be in each other's lives again, but it does...
It signifies that there will be somebody else out there who will kind of treat me the same way as he did those few weeks that we were together in person.
And it's just always a constant reminder that you can't give up on just finding love.
I think by keeping it, it has made me a stronger person in terms of my attitudes towards relationships and is turned from at first an optimistic object into a more pessimistic object and then back into an optimistic object again.
I think I went into this hoping that the quickest answer to getting over a breakup would be to throw everything out, to start fresh, to tidy up.
But now I'm thinking that the key is to keep what you need to remind you that there's more and that there's hope.
At the end of the day, this is just, you know, it's an object that brings me comfort.
Not only does it bring me comfort, it gives me hope that, you know, one day, something like this will happen again.
Thank you, Jack, for showing me what's worth keeping.
I'm glad that I could do that, Meredith.
So here's what I'm thinking about the stuff that's left behind after our relationships end.
Based on my t-shirt, Jack's note, and maybe even Margot's dog, depending on how her ex wound up caring for it, I think sometimes we do have to take important objects and put them out of our sight.
But maybe only temporarily.
Sometimes seeing the relic reminds us that we had it good once, and that there's more romance to come.
Contrary to what I thought, Jack's story taught me that these items can actually help us move on.
That said, if you have an object lying around that's giving you grief and preventing you from letting go, find a friend like I did who'll hide it in a basement for you.
And then maybe when you're ready, you can look at it again.
Because that object might actually remind you that a new beginning is possible.
One of the greatest gifts she gave me was when my own mom died.
It was a physical gift.
She gave me one of her own mother's necklaces.
So I own one of Ann Lander's necklaces.
This might be the nicest thing I own.
But when Margot gave it to me, she said, OK, I know you lost your mom and this is absolutely devastating.
And then she said in this very Margot voice, but you can't dwell on it forever.
She did tell me I could grieve forever and that I'd be grieving over my mom for as long as I lived.
But in Margot fashion, she also told me not to be boring about it.
She told me that the whole point of life is moving on to the next, and the next, and the next.
Not just in marriages, but in experiences, in joyfulness, in every day.
That woman was able to give away a dog, and I don't know if you dog lovers agree with her decision.
Certainly not on behalf of her children, maybe.
But Margot was really good at saying, what's next?
And it didn't have to mean she wasn't honoring her past.
So if I take anything from Margot, it's that, yeah, we lose and we hurt and we grieve and we feel really difficult feelings.
And then other feelings come and everything keeps changing.
I like that lesson a lot.
And it's probably why I smile when I think about her.
