I've been thinking about how strong music can be for evoking memories and the complex emotions associated with them. When I was about 16 or 17, I had very strong emotional reactions to a variety of songs, probably just like every other teenager. Sometimes as a result of something bad happening, a song would get caught in the crossfire and I'd find myself unwilling to listen to it, because of the unpleasant memories associated with it. Over the years, the initial pain of the experience has gone, but I've rarely regained any emotional attachment to the songs I lost.
The most pertinent example of this would be the song "Stairway to Heaven," by Led Zeppelin, which was a song that was played at one of the Junior Proms I went to with my first girlfriend. She went to a different school than I did, so we ended up going to both my prom and her prom. We had actually broken up prior to her prom, but she'd bought the tickets and convinced me that we could just go as friends and have fun. That didn't work so well for either of us, and it kind of reached critical mass when a mutual friend of ours convinced me that I should dance with her at least once. We danced together to Stairway to Heaven, and it was very awkward.
After that, I had a much stronger feeling that breaking up should be an absolute, and that no one does anyone any favors by pretending that they could "just be friends" afterward. For several years after that prom, I simply avoided listening to Stairway to Heaven, although I enjoyed their other songs just fine. I realized that this was silly when I was in my 20s, but by then Led Zeppelin had kind of fallen off my radar as a band to put on the stereo.
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