Not Over 21
21, 25, and 15 years
I sometimes think about that pair of Adele songs, which came out in the middle of my young but truly adult life, “Someone Like You” and “Hello.” Of all the pop culture artifacts I’m familiar with across those 15 years, few capture something so deep and wise about the complexity of relationships, of growing up, moving on, moving on as well as you can.
Though not directly related in subject matter and released several years apart, these two hit songs work well, naturally even, as a pair. They’re really almost describing the same thing from a different direction.
Adele may have not quite intended this; she said “Hello” was not about a specific romantic relationship, or even romantic relationships in general, but about moving on and growing apart from people you love. And that by “the other side,” she meant having made it out of your tumultuous early adult years, your teens and early 20s. Nonetheless, the lyrics themselves work as a sort of follow-up to “Someone Like You.”
I recall a little bit of negative commentary about that first song. That Adele saying “for me, it isn’t over” and “I hate to turn up out of the blue, uninvited / But I couldn’t stay away, I couldn’t fight it” was inappropriate. Things happen. Get over it. He’s married, and not to you. You have no right to insert yourself into someone’s life because of things that happened, well within the bounds of the normal beginnings and endings of relationships. Your ex-boyfriend owes his wife all of himself; there is no place for you anymore. Your heartbreak doesn’t give you a claim on that person forever.
I suppose not.
But in the end, she doesn’t impose herself. The “never mind” that begins the chorus is the moment she decides to stop the thought and try to look forward. The part of the song that repeats is about not doing the thing which the verses contemplate.
But of course, even in looking for someone new, it’s still “someone like you”—neither a rebound nor a fresh start, but a kind of secret replacement. Someone who can be what you were for me. You might argue that this is the most complicated thought in the song; perhaps her next man deserves better than to be measured against the man who broke her heart. But it’s really just an acknowledgement that our experience of the present, and even the unknown future, is necessarily filtered through our past experiences. Memories and experiences outlive their subjects.
But the most final thought expressed in the lyrics is simply, “Don’t forget me.” Please be happy; please remember me. Is it selfish even to see oneself as someone else’s quiet well-wisher, to imagine yourself as in some way still part of their life? Does someone’s marriage demand that you pretend you never knew them? Does it invalidate or morally complicate whatever they left you with, when you were together?
In some abstract sense, in terms of the sanctity or inviolability of marriage, maybe? But not in real life. Not in the human mind or heart.
In “Hello,” the roles are reversed and the singer is the one who looks back with regret at what she did to people. She’s the one who moved on, leaving pain in her wake. That one person can be both a victim and a perpetrator, across time—that the woman who wrung out your tears singing about her own heartbreak inflicted that same pain on another person and did not think much of any of it until years later—is why these two songs work together. They complicate and humanize each other.
“Hello” is about remorse and regret, and so would seem less morally complicated than “Someone Like You.” But the interesting thing is that it isn’t.
Of the two, this one is the one in which she actually contacts the person. “Someone Like You” is a narration of her feelings, semi-turned-around with “never mind”; but in “Hello,” she calls “a thousand times” to apologize (only to get no answer). It is almost with disappointment that she then adds, “It clearly doesn’t tear you apart anymore.”
If anything, these lyrics raise even tougher questions of “appropriateness.” One is the question of contacting someone at all from such a remove. It is easy to subtly turn one’s own guilt into a kind of merit, and to view an apology as something the other person earned for the fact that you still feel something for them.
In this way, it can become about yourself. It is a kind of selfishness to place your own desire for absolution over another person having moved on. Maybe there’s no need for closure; maybe the sufficient closure is that you made it, and they made it, and hopefully, you remember something nice about each other.
Secondly, that slight dejection that whoever it is she’s calling isn’t still terribly broken up by whatever she once did is also a kind of selfishness: a desire to still exert power over that person across time. But it’s also a kind of pain and longing and fear—a desire, at bottom, that memories be in some rough way symmetrical.
Isn’t it kind of terrifying to think that a thing that deeply ashames you, for which you feel conscious of needing forgiveness or absolution, might be forgotten by the person you wronged? That forgiveness and closure are no longer possible, not because the person would withhold them, but because the thing which takes up so much weight in your heart simply means nothing to them anymore? That the person your memory has preserved in amber, at a moment in time, in some sense no longer exists and has gone on to live an entire life without you? To have your existence extinguished in the heart of another person who meant something to you, and to whom you once meant something?
And so remorse can again subtly shift into a kind of entitlement. How dare you not still feel the pain I inflicted on you? How dare you not feel that you need my apology? My desire to apologize is more important than your healing. You owe it to me to validate my guilt.
That plaintive “Don’t forget me, I beg” sees its inverse in “I kind of hope you’re still hurting from that time I broke your heart all those years ago.”
To be remembered—to know that you left an indelible mark on someone, that whatever happens after, they carry a little piece of you forever—is a kind of power. Likewise, the possibility that you failed to do so, that all of this may only exist anymore in your own head, is a difficult thing to contemplate.
Of course, many of us are and have been both of these—the victim and perpetrator of known and unknown, unintended and perhaps at times intended, pain and heartbreak. Some of these things looking back may feel wrong; some may feel unfortunate but necessary, at least at the time.
Some may come to occupy an outsized space in our own minds. Imagining things unsaid, or little gestures not made. The person over whom we might have such regrets may very well not even remember the thing, let alone feel, years later, the absence of some single phrase or gesture. There is no guarantee of symmetry.
None of these themes are new, but there is something distinctively modern about their treatment in these two songs, especially considering Adele’s young age at the time they were written. They reflect the long period of unsettled, attached, semi-attached, unattached adulthood in which so many of us accumulate past selves.
These themes of memory, nostalgia, moving on without forgetting, and what exactly that means or should mean, all involving people for whom most of their life is still ahead of them—these are especially relatable to young people who already feel a tad world-weary.
I can think of one song along similar lines: “In My Life,” from Rubber Soul by John Lennon. Lennon was about 25 when he wrote that song. Somehow it’s a bit unbelievable as a literal narration of a particular young-ish person’s feelings. How could a 25-year-old sound like an 80-year-old, reminiscing about all the people and places he knew throughout his life?
Adele, on the other hand, was only 21 when she released “Someone Like You,” but it is quite believable as a young person’s actual internal experience of a single real event (which it actually is). Lennon’s lyrics nonetheless capture the same complicated phenomenon of one’s past memories and yes, past loves, not evaporating when new love is found:
Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I’ll often stop and think about them
In my life, I love you more
This is not reserving some part of yourself from the person you love now. It is not a kind of infidelity. It is, ultimately, simply an acknowledgement that your own past exists. That it happened. To pretend otherwise is almost to disembody yourself as a human being. It is to pretend that we can transcend our bodies and our nature.
Perhaps Adele’s heartbreaker does remember her; perhaps neither a bad ending nor a new story erases the good times. We are all of these people, in all of these roles, with no way of knowing how, or whether, we live on in another person’s heart, whether someone carries an ache we unwittingly caused, or whether memories which have become encoded as part of our own stories are still held by anybody else at all.
This all goes beyond the confines of romance. It is a reminder of the fleeting but potentially permanent nature of relationships and memories and human moments; of the ways in which actual events can subtly transmute into stories and symbols, which may be significant to only one person in the world.
And at bottom, it is a reminder to leave someone else with the best of you that you can, for however much time, or in whichever way, you are given the chance.
Social card image credit Flickr/anokarina, CC BY-SA 2.0; cropped and blurred.