"It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.” - E.M. Forster
Old Loves is my all-time favorite tumblr creation. Sometimes when the day has me twisted up and wound tight and headache-y, I spend a little time on the Old Loves feed, scrolling through photos and reading the captions until everything is a little looser and calmer and more pliant.
Basically, the site is just a continuous scroll of photos of past celebrity relationships. The pictures are from magazine covers, red carpets, yearbooks, and newspapers. Sometimes there's a caption saying who and where and when. Occasionally, there's a quote or a little bit of context, but usually it's just the photos.
I love the way it's less about how famous the people pictured are (shots of say, Andrew Keegan and Leann Rimes twinning in bedazzled shirts are given equal weight to those of Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles hanging out with Errol Flynn for example) or about how fleeting or long-standing or even non-existent the relationships were, but more about capturing the concept of relationship history.
It has an interesting cumulative effect all collected together like this - the individual photos become tiny parts of a larger, more universal whole that feels allusive and oddly affecting - sort of like love locks on a bridge. It's impossible not to connect the photos to your own history as you scroll, like how Macaulay Culkin married Rachel Miner when I was a junior in high school and the idea of being sure about that kind of commitment at seventeen seemed so huge and foreign to me, or how when Johnny Depp was with Winona Ryder he said the most romantic thing he could imagine was eating the boogers out of someone's nose.
In the context of the whole, even the Cruise/Cruz photos of 2001 kind of make me feel things.
All images via Old Loves.