How to Marie Kondo your love life

RELATIONSHIPS | Do photos of past loves and archived messages truly spark joy for you? Lucy Holden on the need for old-flame decluttering

- Lucy Holden

I ’M trawling through the hidden section of photographs on my phone, deleting with abandon, having decided, aged 33, that it was finally time to Marie Kondo my love life.

For readers unfamiliar with the decluttering guru and author of bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, her method involves mindfully looking through items in your home and asking yourself whether they ‘spark joy’ or, whether they are actually holding you back. If the latter, discard. A principle, I’ve now discovered, that can be applied to modern romance too — whether that’s deleting old photographs and numbers, binning old T-shirts, unfollowing exes on Instagram, or quitting trying to be friends with exes altogether.

I spent my entire twenties in relationships and in my thirties so far have cycled between a number of fun but short-term affairs. In practical terms this means a lot of content: reams of pictures, messages, emails and even the odd letter — heady reminders of everyone I’ve ever dated, available at the touch of a button.