You’re relationship just ended and neither of you want your “gifts” back. Nor do you want the pictures (wedding photos, etc) letters, and what not. What do you do with them? Or what did you do with them?
Here’s what I am about to do.
About a year ago I got divorced and in the process of moving out things got messy between us. I ended up leaving a lot of my stuff at the house, and without realizing it he threw all the wedding photos, love letters, entire relationship history in my truck.
Fast forward to now, I have some how ended up with my wedding dress, all the wedding photos, letters, card, etc in my apartment. I am in the process of moving to a more affordable apartment and for obvious reasons I don’t want to bring “my past” to the new place.
When it comes to the wedding photos, there is no question in my mind that I want to burn them. A lot of my friends are questioning why I would want to burn them. Why not just throw them away? My reasoning is, is that I don’t want them to exist anymore. I know there will be ashes, but I don’t want noticeable faces (Happy. Kisses. etc) floating around this world. Sure they be in some land fill, but knowing that my smiling face during a wedding/relationship that doesn’t exist anymore, bothers me. It isn’t that I want them gone, I don’t want them to be recognizable.
The wedding dress will go to a consignment shop and the rings as well as any jewelery he gave me will be pawned. (I did try to return it, but he doesn’t want it back for the same reasons I am selling them.)
I’m in the process of getting divorced, and moved out last summer.
I left my wedding dress where it was hanging, still in its bag from the cleaners 13 years previously. I realized later that I should have taken it with me, so I could consign it or otherwise sell it.
The wedding albums were unceremoniously dumped on the bedroom floor.
Any love letters and cards he’d given me were tossed in the trash sometime during the packing process.
I still have all the jewelry he gave me, including both of our wedding rings. (He’d ripped his off and thrown it at me when I told him I knew he was cheating and to get out)
I’d like to sell or pawn some of it, but I don’t want some pawnbroker offering me $25 for a piece I know is worth a lot more
I threw the mixtape in the trash, but didn’t destroy it. I tore up the pictures and love letters and threw them away–somehow I couldn’t bring myself to burn them. I wore his ring (neither engagement nor wedding) till I met someone else, and then I dropped it in the pond near where I was living at the time.
I should have kept the ring. It wasn’t particularly valuable–a silver band worth about $20–but that was what I felt the worst about.
I kept everything in a bag in my closet for three years. A couple of months ago when I was doing some spring cleaning, I realized that I didn’t need them anymore and dumped the lot into a dumpster.
My ex-wife packed up and sent me everything that even remotely reminded her of me. Even things she bought when we went shopping together that meant nothing to me. I threw away some of it, kept the rest. Even after all the bad stuff, I don’t blame inanimate objects for her insanity and I’m not going to be any more bothered by being “reminded” of her than I already am. Trying to erase the past doesn’t work. Just accept it and move on, leaving it where it is, the past.
My single exception, a few months after our divorce was final, was to take my ($200) wedding band out and toss it in a lake.
Which just now reminds me that she didn’t return any jewelry or her own wedding band. I bet she pawned them.
i walked away from it all only to find out my mother “kept it for me” because she thought I would want it. Now I have to wait until after my impending move to dispose of it, rather than hurting her when she tried to help by keeping it.
She actually tried to give my wedding dress to my married best friend. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
I had this unmarked video tape that I hoped might be porn. I couldn’t watch it at my mom’s house, so I brought it over to my boyfriend’s place. We plopped on the catch, hoping for the best, waited for the snow to fade to imagery and dang it if it wasn’t a tape of my ex-husband doing a “practice interview” for a job with a job coach. Yeah, that’s $2k I’m never getting back. My boyfriend got to see my ex in amazing technicolor for about 5 minutes, then we dumped it in the trash.
Having recently seen Castaway, I realize now I should have used it as rope for the raft to escape the island . . .
I stayed, she left, and this house is way out in the country. It was a simple matter to drag, shovel, tote & so forth all the remains of years of marriage to a pile and burn it. It was cold, dead of winter, and the fire & Jack Daniels made for a pleasant evening. High heel shoes and women’s old coats burn for a long time!
The wedding ring I kept until my next deep sea fishing trip. The ring now rests at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and all is done.
The pictures/albums you may want in future(even if it’s just to laugh at the hairstyles), so store them out of sight. Sell or re-gift the jewely and keep your favorites for yourself. They’re just pretty things, really, and if you’ve enjoyed them, wear them. A diamond never judges.
With the new move I have taken time to go through some boxes and found a pack of pics from the ex’s sister’s wedding. Some pics were good ones of his sis and hub so I plan on sending them to his mom to give his sister. There’s also a family pic of his side that will be going back.
He also left some movies, games, electronics, etc. I gave him advanced notice I was moving and when (this was over 6 months ago) and he never arranged to come by to get his stuff. I packed it all & moved. Unfortunately I didnt have enough room for a couple of the older computers my oldest had been using so I gave it to someone who could benefit from it. Even after I moved i had the same cellphone number for months & he never called, never even emailed to ask to get his things so I figured he let me keep it out of guilt.
I plan to trash any letters, cards, etc. I still have my engagement ring which is a simple silver poesy ring inscribed in Gaelic. I’m not sure what I will do with it.
The cards are in a box where I keep all my cards; the pictures are in boxes where I keep all my pictures.
I have always kept any cards I get and any pictures I take. To destroy eight years of history seemed, to me anyway, a bit over-the-top. In thirty years I may like to recall what I looked like in my early twenties, and he’s in over half of them. I regard those pictures/cards the same way I regard the ones from college; I don’t see those people any more and that was a time in my life that’s been over for a long time. It’s a piece of my history, and someday I may like to look at it.
He only ever bought me one piece of jewelry. I assume it’s still buried in a box with all the other jewelry I own and never wear.
The other household items were either divvied up or donated.
We were never married, so this question doesn’t apply to me, but…I was always under the impression that you gave the ring back only if the marriage never took place. After the marriage, the rings become the property of the person wearing them; a husband therefore doesn’t expect to get the diamonds back. (Nor does the wife get his band back, although that’s usually a moot point because it isn’t nearly as valuable.)
Speaking as an old fart who many years ago did the ‘slash and burn’ routine with all the old stuff that reminded me of the ex (wedding dresses/photos/momentos etc) may I just say that all these years down the track I regret having done so.
Your anger aside, those photos are a bit like a historical record. Your kids or grand kids (or his for that matter) might find them really interesting one day. Whatever you feel about them now, they portray an event that happened and was important enough at the time to warrant recording. Burning the photos might be cathartic but doesn’t change whatever happened and it does deny anyone who comes after of a piece of the puzzle. If you’ve got to vent your id, pick the one you hate most and burn it. Box up the rest and give them to your mum, sister, cousin, whoever looks most like the family historian.
He asked for the ring back in a fight we had months before the final blowup. We’d gotten married wearing jeans, so no dress to worry about. There aren’t all that many pictures, either, but whatever exists is probably in my son’s possession.
I gave my ring to a charity shop - thought some good might as well come of it. I kept one album from the wedding and gave it to my Mum. Nearly 10 years on, I recently had a look and was pleased to find that it meant nothing to me - like looking at someone else’s pictures.
In support of chicken wire?, I say keep some pics. You never know who might want them sometime in the future.
I know that I didn’t have to give it back, but the engagement ring alone was 5 thousand dollars. I felt it was only right to aleast try to give it back. He didn’t want it and I don’t want to keep coming across it.
In response to many others, we never had children together and while we were together 4 years we were only married a year. There may have been good times, but all that is over shadowed with many hurtful words, actions, etc. Looking back at any of those photos, rings, and letters only make me long for a time that will never be possible again. He has moved on. Has a new girlfriend and gave me every bit of evidence of our time together while erasing my very presence from the house.
I think or feel that seeing or having those things still exist, will in some way prevent me from truly moving on.
Moved out last July. I still have my tux (I bought it several years before the wedding and wore it on a couple of other occasions, so it doesn’t have just that one association for me, and who knows, maybe it will fit again someday). I still have my wedding band; it lives in my spare change goblet along with another item my ex-to-be gave me once that I used to carry daily. I haven’t worked out yet what’s going to happen to those. Other things like letters, cards, pictures, will stay or go based on my level of sentimentality (normally pretty high) at the moment I’m evaluating them.
I’ve kept most of the cards and letters and photos - they’re in the same box as the rest of the keepsakes I’ve hoarded away over the years.
I guess I’m just lucky that both of my LTRs ended amicably, at least on my part. Maybe if I regretted those relationships more, I’d have been inclined to do something destructive (I suspect ex #2 destroyed all signs I’d ever existed, though… it’s certainly the way he handled all previous breakups)
Speaking as the child of divorced parents, though, I will second the motion regarding the wedding album if you happen to have kids. To you, it’s just bad memories of a relationship gone horribly wrong, but to them it’s a record of the fact that mom and dad once cared enough about each other to bring them into this world. If you’re kiddo-free, though, save only one or two in case of future regret and burn the rest… catharsis is a good thing.
