It’s my last week in Sweden. I’m on the train from Malmö to Gothenburg to visit a close friend who’s just moved from Amsterdam back to Sweden. This trip to Gothenburg, and the goodbye it will end with, feels like an exact mirror of saying goodbye to her in Amsterdam one year ago. It should serve as an opportunity to reflect, but I’m having a hard time feeling into this transition clearly.
I’ve spent the last week moving through all of the ‘lasts’ — last moments with participants, my last day as a guest researcher in the Centre for Sexology and Sexuality Studies, my last package of coffee bought from the local grocery store.
Despite these ‘lasts’, I’m aware that I will spend the next two years working with all my materials from this year, including fieldnotes, audio recordings, photos and artworks. I’m saying goodbye to the people, and the physical place, but I’m aware that I’ll need to stay very close to this year mentally and emotionally in order to preserve its spirit in writing. Upon return to Amsterdam, I’ll enter an intense phase of data analysis, which will progress loosely chronologically, starting from my initial fieldnotes from September 2025, and my first interview in November 2025.
So I find myself in a strange temporal middle: I’m saying goodbye in order to cycle back to the past, while my interlocutors and colleagues will continue on into their futures (until I send them a copy of my dissertation, by which point they may have all but forgotten our time together). I understand this temporal position in relation to the time Lisa Baraitser theorises: that which does not move forward, but rather “pools” (2015, 2). Baraitser posits that enduring temporalities, including the return to and recollection of the past, can be understood as temporal practices of care and relationship-formation.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with the notion of enduring relationships as an ongoing process of partners coordinating their pasts and futures. As relationships last through months and years, partners’ shared past accumulates. Some memories fade, while others gain significance through repetition, or take on different meanings with new experience. Partners select which stories to tell me during an interview and which memories to display in their home through souvenirs, letters, and photos. They are often mindful of leaving space for their partner to establish their version, but do correct each other and attempt to negotiate the record when clashes occur.
My current hunch is that romantic partners are partly motivated to tend to their shared past, because it serves to as a source of insights into their shared future. I believe in tending to their shared past as one might a shared garden, partners demonstrate care for each other, and for the life they have built. I am of course not creating a future with my interlocutors in the way they do with each other as partners. I do, however, feel a sense of responsibility in concretizing our shared pasts in words. After all, my fieldwork has shown me that “endings” and “conclusions” never constitute breaks as radical as their labels suggest; affects, relationships, memories, materials always endure; there is always continuance.
