Why We Can't Let Go of an Unfinished Love

• The Zeigarnik effect
• Letting go

"Why is a first love always so hard to shake off?"

"Why do I keep dwelling on a love I once had?"

"Why does what I won never feel worth treasuring?"

This is precisely the "Zeigarnik effect" stirring things up inside you.

What is the "Zeigarnik effect"?

What is the "Zeigarnik effect"? Let's start with a quick warm-up. Of two things — one still unfinished, and one already neatly wrapped up — which leaves the deeper impression? The answer is the former. Once we have completed something, the mind relaxes, and our memory of it fades quickly the moment it ends. By contrast, when we are faced with a problem we have not solved, or cannot solve, we try every possible way to work it out and find the answer — just as an unfinished task on our desk keeps lurking stubbornly in our mind. This state of mind, in which an unresolved matter leaves a deep imprint, is known as the "Zeigarnik effect" (Zeigarnik effect).

The psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik (Bluma Zeigarnik) once carried out a memory experiment in which participants were asked to complete 22 simple tasks. Group A finished all of their tasks smoothly, without interruption, while Group B were interrupted at irregular intervals and so were unable to complete all of theirs. In the final part of the experiment, both groups were invited to recall the tasks they had just done. The statistics showed that Group B could recall 68% of theirs on average, whereas Group A could recall only 43%. A further finding was that within Group B, the first task each participant brought to mind immediately was, five times over, an "unfinished task" rather than a "completed task". Through these results, Zeigarnik found that some unfinished matters stay lodged in our memory, refusing to be set down for a long time, forming the dwelling thought that "the unfinished, paradoxically, runs deeper"; while what has been completed brings a sense of satisfaction, registers as a chapter that has closed, no longer carries a strong motivation to be remembered, and therefore comes to feel light and of little consequence.

It turns out that many people carry within them a hidden "urge to complete": as long as the thing to be done is left unfinished for a day, that day brings no release — as though a great stone were pressing on the heart. There is a story that circulates online: a composer who loved to lie in bed, whose wife wanted to get her husband up, so on the piano she played the first three chords of a phrase of music. The composer heard it, immediately turned to face the other way — and then could not help but climb out of bed to play the final chord, completing what his mind had registered as unfinished. In our everyday lives, this "Zeigarnik effect" keeps showing up: a television drama, for instance, deliberately ends each episode on a cliffhanger or a high point of suspense, luring you to keep watching the next episode to complete the story left unfinished in your mind; once you have begun a jigsaw puzzle or started knitting a scarf, you cannot rest until, in one go, you have pieced it together, knitted it through.

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A first love left with regrets makes your brain treat it as something unfinished

For a first love or an earlier relationship that ended without illness yet left you with regrets, these things you regard as "unfinished / unsuccessful" often occupy an active spot in the brain. Even years later, you still think of this person; the moment the memory is searched for, it connects at once, and the more you think about it the more your heart aches — you may even fall into "if only at the time…, perhaps we might have…" sorts of supposed fantasies. Because reality is cruel, people always like to let things unfold in their fantasies in the direction they prefer, turning every imagined "what if" into a lovely fairy tale: you would "believe" you could have carried on with this person, "believe" this person was flawless — until in the end you can no longer tell which part is real memory and which part is the prettified, fantasised memory, forming the dwelling illusions that "first love was beautiful" or "I want to go back and reclaim that first love I left with regrets". It need not be a first love; it can be any earlier relationship you once regarded as unfinished, unsuccessful, and full of regret.

People's memories are not necessarily wrong, but they will certainly contain distortions. The person you long for and that feeling, or perhaps just a crossover of the real memory from the past and the prettified fantasy of the present — to put it another way, it is absolutely not the real thing. Never being able to forget the people and matters of the past keeps you from giving your whole heart to enjoying and being present with what you have now, which is what truly exists. The best approach is, each time a relationship ends, to hold a proper farewell ceremony — with yourself, and even with the other person — so that no doubt or regret remains entangled, and so that both your brain and your heart receive a strong signal that "this relationship has closed file". Being unable to feel free and unburdened the moment a relationship ends is only human; in that case, do it at any "now" you feel ready, summon the courage to see him/her after many years, share a meal together as a closing statement, and thoroughly resolve the "Zeigarnik effect" lying within you.

Rather than letting that dormant volcano rumble inside your heart from time to time, it is better to take back control and turn it into an extinct one. Letting the matters of the past come to a complete, rounded close — that is the secret to making the present more beautiful and fulfilling.