It's a strange, slightly embarrassing thing to notice: missing someone you'd have been hard-pressed to call a good presence in your life at the time. Not a villain, necessarily — just someone whose company, honestly assessed, cost more than it gave. And yet, months or years later, a specific kind of longing shows up anyway.
The honest assessment and the longing can both be accurate. They're not measuring the same thing.
Memory keeps the peak and the ending, not the average
Donald Redelmeier and Daniel Kahneman's research on remembered experience found that people's recollections are dominated by the most intense moment and the final moment of an experience — not by its overall average.1 A relationship that was mostly difficult but had one genuinely intense, connected stretch can be remembered through that stretch, disproportionately, regardless of what the bulk of it was actually like.
Some periods of your life get promoted, whoever was in them
David Rubin and Matthew Schulkind's work on the distribution of autobiographical memories across the lifespan identified a reminiscence bump — a period, often adolescence and early adulthood, from which memories are recalled disproportionately often and vividly, independent of how good or bad those years actually were.2 If the person you're missing belonged to that stretch of your life, they may be resurfacing because of when they were there, not because of who they were.
Cultural scripts decide what counts as significant, whether or not it was good
Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin found that memories aligning with widely shared cultural "life scripts" — the milestones a culture treats as inherently meaningful — are recalled as more significant than memories that don't fit the script, regardless of their emotional content.3 A difficult relationship that coincided with a scripted milestone — a first serious relationship, a move, a graduation — can feel retroactively bigger than its actual quality would justify.
None of this means the missing is fake. It means the missing and the liking were never measuring the same thing, and untangling them usually takes an honest, dated record — not just the feeling, which will keep voting for the peak and the ending every time. Related: the people you stopped mentioning and you cannot feel a year passing from inside it.
- Redelmeier, D. A., & Kahneman, D. (1996). Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: Real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures. Pain, 66(1), 3–8.
- Rubin, D. C., & Schulkind, M. D. (1997). Distribution of important and word-cued autobiographical memories in 20-, 35-, and 70-year-old adults. Memory & Cognition, 25(6), 859–866.
- Berntsen, D., & Rubin, D. C. (2004). Cultural life scripts structure recall from autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 32(3), 427–442.