Despite being a love columnist, it’s safe to say that, in the realm of love and relationships, I’ve only shared meaningful connections with a few people. One of them, a friend I met in February, was a business student who graduated a year earlier than expected. What began as a friendship became something I only fully understood when it was already ending.

When he left, I continued with my normal routine. I was sad, of course, though no one knew it, but I kept moving forward. I secured a job I love, continued to write and built a version of my life that looks, on my resume, better than before. In absolute terms, as I often see my life, you might say that I don’t need them. And yet, he reminded me of something I had forgotten: who I am outside of loving someone.

The law of conservation of energy tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change from one form into another. We tend to treat love the same way: someone stays or leaves, a relationship works or doesn’t, love survives or dies.

So, in my mind, finding love again would somehow mean that what came before wasn’t really love. If I could give my heart to someone else, I must have been wrong about what I felt for him. But I don’t think that’s true. We keep things we’ll never use again — clothes that remind us of a certain time, old plane tickets, birthday cards.

Yet when a love story ends, we often act as though the only healthy thing to do is throw it away. Why? If you love someone and it ends, where does the love go? Does it go to their next partner? Does some portion of it disappear the moment the relationship does? I’m not sure.

Philosopher Malcolm Schofield, writing for the “Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” examines Diotima’s view of love in Plato’s “The Symposium” and its understanding of love as something that extends beyond physical attraction. In Plato’s account, Diotima describes love as a desire to create something lasting through beauty, wisdom and goodness.

“Other animals and many humans are content with physical reproduction, but humans are capable of mental creation when inspired by a beautiful body, and still more by a beautiful soul or personality,” Schofield writes. “This is how the activities of poets and legislators and the virtuous are to be understood.”

Maybe love, then, is not valuable only because it produces a permanent relationship. Maybe it can also change the person who experiences it — leaving behind beauty, wisdom, memory or simply a different version of ourselves.

That does not mean every relationship is destined to become a lesson, or that heartbreak should be romanticized. Some relationships harm us, and leaving them is an act of self-care. But when a relationship is meaningful and ends without erasing what it gave us, its value does not have to depend on its permanence.

Psychologist Caroline Sandrick, writing in her 2013 master’s thesis “Self-Expansion and Breakups: Effects on Possessions,” suggests that much of what becomes part of us through a relationship can remain even after the relationship itself is gone, expanding on and explaining the self-expansion theory developed by psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron. 

And maybe that is what we mistake for loss. We lose the person, but we don’t lose everything they gave us. Every person I have loved has left something behind: A new understanding of intimacy; a memory I can’t recreate; a joke I still laugh at; a lesson I didn’t know I needed; a version of myself that existed because I knew them.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote that we should distinguish between what is within our control and what is not. We cannot control whether someone stays, whether they return our feelings or whether a relationship survives. But we can control what we do with the experience. We can decide whether a relationship ending makes us more cynical or more honest, more guarded or more discerning, more afraid or more capable of loving with intention.

In doing so, I’m learning not to hold on to people who have chosen to leave, and not to confuse longing with loyalty. Instead, I want us to stop treating every ended relationship as something that must be erased. Keep the lesson. Keep your gratitude. Keep the parts of yourself that became possible because you loved someone.

I am a combination of all the people who have loved me and all the people I have loved in return. When my time at USC is over, I will not be able to honestly say that I was ever alone. I will carry pieces of the people I met here everywhere I go. Some pieces will be funny. Some will hurt. Some will be so small, I won’t notice them until years later. But they will be there.

Andrew Cardenas is a senior writing about love in all its forms in his column, “No Straight Answers,” which runs every other Wednesday. He is also the DEIA director at the Daily Trojan.