It’s really a great question and a great series of reflections here. It used to be sometimes looked on nostalgia instead of failure. A individual would look back at time spent with longing, instead of with regret. For example, I look back on a love I had that burned brightly for a year, and remember that burning and passion that was within me at the time. I can’t recapture that burning sensation and affection again. The relationship ended somehow, perhaps on good terms or bad terms, but what I lost inside me at the start and at times was a burning inside me, and with often affection and attention that was returned from the lover. When I look back at that past year’s ago, I see that passion I had, and felt in return. It’s now gone from me immediate surroundings, and I can’t it back, but I feel that warmth from that distant fire a bit. It’s a longing made more powerful by the loss of not being able to replicated it.
Somehow, our American society is focus so strongly on failure or success, a type of touchdown mentality, that we can see inside ourselves to feel what we felt as individuals, what others can’t feel. We have to “prove” the relationship was a “success,” was not a “failure,” that it “worked” out. This need to prove a relationship succeeds is a monetary display of wealth, like the hood ornament of Benz. I once saw a driver, a young doctor, of his luxury convertible top end Porsche yelling at a man in an old truck for something, probably cutting him in off in a parking lot, outside a Starbucks. The fit muscular youngish doctor reached into his car and pulled out a gun. I was driving by slowly at that moment and became scared. Fortunately no one was shot. The middle aged black man in the hold work pick up truck was not hurt. But why buy such a luxury car when all he could do feel was rage, rage, rage. His wealth, his life dedicate to success and achievement, but he couldn’t feel anything inside him, any love. He will never know nostalgia, the longing for love past, the dime light from a burning distant fire.