My ex keeps copying my Spotify playlists
What should we do with discarded intimacies?
This is the weekly edition of Idea Salon — the newsletter from Lou Ramsay, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
I don’t know why I decided to scroll through his profile – call it sadistic curiosity or the cliché traits of a journalist being a nosy parker, but I did and there it was. A Spotify playlist identical to one I had created just after we had broken up.
Song after song, ticked box on ‘liked’ for each tune, sat my playlist, regurgitated by someone I no longer spoke to. I felt nauseated.
When we had started to tentatively date, music was something we bonded over. Day after day, we would send each other a song we loved. ‘Yes’, we’d frantically message back to one another. ‘Yes, this is SO GOOD’. ‘I love this song, how did you find it?’ ‘I think our Spotify Discover is actually the same.’ ‘Yeah, I bet the Spotify Gods are trying to play Cupid.’
Like all modern romances, this led to the ultimate sign of intimacy; curating a shared Spotify playlist of songs we wanted the other to know. A mishmash of Still Woozy, Earl Sweatshirt, Mt Joy, Duckwrth, KAYTRANADA, Otis Redding and Shakey Graves. It felt like we had made a melting point of every song we had loved – and ones which we knew intrinsically the other would adore, too. It felt real. It felt like us, before there was an us.
Sometimes it was as if we were using songs to say things we couldn’t quite name yet, but hoping the other would hear what we were trying to communicate. Song trades in the morning would meander into late-night conversation, lyrics changing from absentmindedly living (with fantastic guitar solos) to Billy Joel softly crooning about admiring someone for the longest time.
‘Are we entering our Olivia Rodrigo era with that contribution?’, I’d sent him. ‘If the song applies in a positive way, then yeah. I think it does… do you?’ he asked back.
We were both still licking wounds from previous relationships, attempting to appear more whole and healed than we were. The connection felt like what we had been searching for - a heady rush of endorphins, feels-like-a-third-date recognition and an assurance that we could be cared for by someone again. We weren’t as broken as we had first thought - not unlovable or unworthy, but just bruised and tender. It felt fragile and soft, like we were both trying something who’s gravity had taken us by surprise. Hope. That’s what felt so fragile, tender but weighty - being heartful of optimism.
‘My pals keep telling me off for waxing lyrical about you in the pub,’ he’d text. ‘See how many more times you can say my name before they lose it,’ I’d joke back.
Other times, it felt good to have someone you wanted to speak to all hours of the day, who gave me artists I still listen to. I even continue to skip over a song on that playlist, because it makes me think of walking home from his place and feeling a bubbling sense of happiness wrapped up in trepidation. The wrestle of being happy enough for now, but still feeling that tap, tap, tap of wanting more.
‘Ask what Lou thinks’, his mates would message him while they navigated dating. ‘She knows what’s what.’
Like most things, we ended not with a bang, but a whimper. The moreness urge had won out, as my city slowly thawed from winter and the dating playground opened up to me, vast and filled with delicious potential. He moved on into a new relationship, proudly snapped on Instagram for the world to see. It felt like everything was going the right way. We had parted and it was the best decision. A clean break, no murkiness between us. I had imagined passing each other in the street and catching up like old friends, because that’s what we were now, surely.
Until this playlist starkly lit up my laptop screen.
I clicked off it and onto another playlist – again, there was a playlist I had made, songs in a disarraying order but nevertheless, there from weeks before. Click to another and boom, not identical but too many songs to just be a coincidence from a few months ago. Even the theme was the same, for summer driving escapes. Had he been… listening to my playlists after our break-up? Cherry-picking songs he liked? Surely that violated a dating proverb. Thou Shall Not Steal Thy Ex’s Spotify Songs.
I went from nauseated to indignant – those were MY artists, carefully found on late, emotional nights, the songs placed in order just so to set the mood. It felt like he had scooped up bits of my heart and then dumped them haphazardly, as a claim of his own. Would other women go onto his profile and swoon over his music taste? The taste that I had curated? The thought of him managing to smugly piggyback off these songs I held dear, masquerading as other-worldly felt outrageous. The fake intimacy he could cultivate with these new women, feigning his interest in these artists. I scrolled more, my inflated indignance rising with each tap.
Then, that song staring back at me. On a playlist titled, of all things, ‘waxing lyrical’. My anger and self-righteousness popped like a balloon.
‘Knowing you might have fucked it, but missing them anyways’, he had tentatively written out as the caption. Song after song, it followed artists mournfully detailing losing out on a love that could have been. Dotted in between were songs we had delighted over, including one I had played to him in the early hours of the morning, rambling on about its greatness.
‘You need to understand just how incredible this guitar solo is’, I had told him seriously, standing in his jumper.
‘I’m listening, I am’, he protested, reaching for me from his bed.
‘You can’t listen properly if you’re touching me’, I had said. ‘Really listen’, I cupped his face, touching our foreheads together.
He looked up. ‘What makes you think I wouldn’t listen to everything you felt was important?’
Routines, inside jokes and sayings, a private language just for two, swapped music and delighted recommendations, the places you both went to on Sundays when everything felt dizzy with possibilities. They all fall into a soupy memory graveyard when the relationship crumbles. The grief of these things, once held so close with such importance, suddenly discarded and grey. The loss can feel palpable in those early weeks.
Even trinkets of your time together, like that song I jump over each time, feels like pushing down on a bruise. It is cruel to abandon these intimacies, who’s existence is proof of a relationship being haphazardly built, but crueler still to keep them hostage in a bitter attempt for permanency.
What do you do with these things? They aren’t physical items you can give back like a jumper, but echoes of time passing, occupying mental real estate as you wrestle with their memory. You can’t erase the time you spent together because it’s there, it happened. You will stumble across an inside joke one day, scribbled out on a forgotten piece of paper and feel a twinge. You watch couples at brunch, swapping forkfuls, and ache. The song you have been trying to avoid comes on with a booming clatter at your new favourite bar. The beer in your hand feels too moist, like you might drop it if you keep attempting to hold on.
The testament to heartbreak is how it all starts to ease, until you feel nothing at all. They come up and it’s a ghost of a past that is so long ago, it doesn’t nauseate you anymore.
A few months later, I went back to his profile to check. The playlist was gone.
What intimacies have you had to abandon when a relationship ends? And how have you made peace of letting go of them? I’d love to discuss with you in the comments below.