Watch Insight's episode Turning Back Time, exploring nostalgia and what dwelling on the past can mean for the present, on SBS On Demand.
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Turning Back Time
episode • Insight • news and current affairs • 51m
episode • Insight • news and current affairs • 51m
We’ve been together for nearly 20 years, married for 14 and we adore our life. But we want to return to the early days of our relationship.
We live an ordinary but special life. We have two healthy young boys, do work we enjoy, and we live in a slightly ramshackle home in the Brisbane suburbs that we’ll be paying off for 40 years.
We have amazing friends and family, and despite the immense demands of parenthood - the inevitable exhaustion, and the lack of spontaneity - it’s a life filled with love and family.
But there was something we were missing.
Recently we realised we weren’t getting much time together as a couple. We’re overcome by nostalgia and deeply desire to turn back the years. We want to be us again in the early days of our relationship.
We’ve found ourselves longing for the way we were.
Cate and Nick in their younger days.
‘We desperately want to visit our younger selves’
So we made a commitment to start going on dates again. Not particularly exciting dates: going for a walks, sitting on the step drinking coffee, and watching a movie at home on a Saturday night.
We decided to have a 'wine and records' date night, while listening to a Fat Freddy’s Drop album, which soaked us in nostalgia. We desperately want to step back in time for a while, to visit our younger selves when we were falling in love. For us, music evokes those ethereal nostalgic feelings because it forged our early love. The early 2000s live music scene in Brisbane was the backdrop to our story.
We got to know each other at gigs – Salmonella Dub at the Arena, Groove Armada at Riverstage. Our first real date, when we shared our true feelings, was while watching Missy Higgins at Fortitude Valley venue The Rev in 2003, for which tickets cost just $7.
From there we were all in, enjoying a music-filled adventurous life together. We saw Mia Dyson at the Troubadour, Loren at The Alley, The Cat Empire at The Arena and You Am I at the Zoo. We loved music festivals in those early days and without a mortgage, our part-time jobs left us plenty of disposable income for tickets to Woodford, BluesFest and Splendour to see our favourite artists.
But nostalgia can be tricky.
Cate and Nick call themselves the 'Wrinkle Free Rovers'.
Nostalgia hides the truth
We’re tricked into remembering only the good and fun parts: that fresh new love we had found in each other, that freedom to travel and have new experiences.
But in truth not everything was rosy and these waves of wistfulness hide a bigger truth.
This was a period of our lives when we were facing some complex mental and physical health challenges. Our parents were splitting up, we were losing friends and family far too soon, and we shared fear and confusion about our future.
But it was these challenges that forged who we are today.
The trajectory of our relationship hasn’t been smooth. Initially, there was co-dependency, then a large separation caused by the immense change that parenting brings, followed by a “returning” to ourselves as individuals, painstakingly facing our own personal challenges while attempting to raise our sons.
Getting in tune with our own needs has allowed us to return to each other and the relationship as more whole individuals.
The power of looking back
When you’re young the way older people talk about the passing of time seems odd. You hear phrases like “I can’t believe that was over 20 years ago”, or words to a teenager of “I still think of you as a baby”.
Young brains can’t understand this, how can something that happened 20 years ago feel so recent, how can time slip past you like that?
But it does.
As you age, life speeds up even as it stretches out. You blink, and you’re in the middle, married, with a house in the suburbs and a couple of kids.
That’s our life.
In late November this year, we’ll be going to see The Cruel Sea for the 30th anniversary of their seminal album The Honeymoon Is Over. This album was a part of the soundtrack to our year-long campervan road trip around Australia in 2011, a journey we took in part to avoid the inevitable “growing up”. We called ourselves the 'Wrinkle Free Rovers' to clearly distinguish ourselves from the Grey Nomads ruling the roads.
We know the music will transport us to those road-tripping days in Tamworth, Jindabyne and Strahan, and we’ll find ourselves longing for those days when we were “freer”, and wrinkle-free.
We’ll feel like the lyrics of the title track that say: “it’s never going to be that way again”.
But the joy and sorrow of nostalgia is transporting our new selves back to those simple, naïve moments; the people that have changed through hard-fought and often painful self-growth.
It’s beautiful to remember the way we were then, and then float back into the imperfect present, because even though there is much to fondly recall, there is also plenty we’re happy to leave behind.
