We had been living in the museum of our own relationship for three years, carefully preserving what we used to be, maintaining exhibits of old intimacy while the actual connection had long since expired. We still went through the motions—the ritual dinners, the obligatory affection, the conversations that covered familiar ground without discovering anything new—but we were curators of dead love rather than participants in living love.
The relationship had ended gradually, so gradually that neither of us noticed when it crossed from present tense to past tense. We kept showing up to tend the memorial we had built to what we once shared, too attached to the history to acknowledge the absence of a future.
Why do we stay in relationships that have expired? Maybe because admitting it’s over requires admitting we failed at something we desperately wanted to succeed at. Maybe because the fear of being alone outweighs the loneliness of being with someone who has become a stranger. Maybe because starting over requires more energy than maintaining the familiar dysfunction.
Or maybe because we confuse duration with depth, mistake comfort with compatibility, believe that the amount of time invested should determine the decision to continue investing time. We stay because of sunk costs rather than future potential, because of what we’ve already built rather than what we might still build.
The museum of what was became our home because it felt safer than the uncertainty of what might be. Better to live with the ghost of love than risk never finding love again. Better to preserve what we once had than admit it had decomposed beyond recognition.
But museums are places you visit, not places you live. They’re designed to honor the past, not to create a future. When your relationship becomes an exhibit rather than an experience, when you’re more committed to its history than its possibility, you’re no longer in a partnership—you’re in preservation society.
The expired relationship limps along on life support, sustained by habit rather than passion, by obligation rather than choice, by the momentum of what was rather than the energy of what could be. Both people know it’s over, but neither wants to be the one to pull the plug.
Maybe the kindest thing we can do for love that has died is to give it a proper burial rather than trying to preserve it indefinitely. Maybe honoring what we shared means allowing it to end with dignity rather than forcing it to continue without life.
Tonight I want to ask the difficult question: am I living in a relationship or in a museum? And if it’s a museum, do I have the courage to close the exhibition and see what life looks like outside its walls?