Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?
Dolly Parton and Chet Atkins
This week, a platonic friend sent me this track. It’s about someone missing their ex and it made me think about past relationships. Whether they finished on good terms or more acrimoniously, we often hold a certain amount of nostalgia, grief and deep love for old relationships. Old friends with whom we have lost contact, new friends with whom we find we have just drifted apart, partners we once loved with all our heart, or lost opportunities, moments that passed us by.
Even though the song has a typically beautiful, cheeky Dolly-esque ‘look at what you missed out on’ style, the lyrics also relates to disconnection in relationships, as life happens and we accept the universal truth that relationships can just change.
As a relationship therapist I often find myself thinking about previous relationships, good and bad, to draw upon, or to reflect on things I could and SHOULD have done better. This song resonated with me a lot in that sense:
“Do you ever wake up lonely in the middle of the night ’cause you miss me? Do you darlin’? Do your memories ever take you back to another place and time?
…When I think of you and the love we once knew, how I wish we could go back in time.”
But what can we do? We can’t go back in time. We can’t say, or be all the things we would be now, given another chance, with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe that’s the same for both of us or maybe one person feels better without the relationship in their life?
In couples counselling and relationship therapy we can work to heal using this insight, learn from it and do things differently in the ‘here and now’, by not making those same mistakes again.
Whether I still want or have that person in my life or not, I personally do ‘miss you darling,’ yet in the beautifully wise words of the 21-year-old Adele, ‘Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead.’