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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at CU Boulder chapter.

I’m the kind of person where when things get tough, I make a Spotify playlist about it. Music has always been a sense of comfort to me. I’ve carefully curated my playlists to tell a certain story or convey emotion about something I’ve experienced in my life. Usually (and at least in all of these examples), these playlists are about a situation with a romantic partner… of some sort. Yeah, it’s complicated. 

I’ve decided to go back and dissect these playlists, from the songs to the name. While sometimes it’s not fun to relive these situations, I think it’s equally important to remember how they made me feel, so I can learn for the next experience. I create things to remember and hold on to, which still holds true even to these playlists.

“i’m in love with you and you probably know that”

I created this playlist during my senior year of high school after I had a crush on someone so strong, I had no idea what to do with myself. Since I went to the same school from kindergarten to 12th grade, I never really experienced that feeling of liking someone new. The people I liked before, I had memories of them from 3rd grade, creating a pretty good deterrent to no longer like them now. 

The songs are about love, but in a cheesy “I want to be with you for the rest of my life” kind of way. When I created this playlist, I was severely crushing on someone I had met from another school, and while I hoped that I was being cool about it, I definitely wasn’t. It’s funny now because I’m still friends with the person this playlist was about. While I’m no longer in love with him now, he once told me he did in fact know how into him I was back in high school. Awkward.

“in another life”

For the first three years of college, I was really good friends with this guy I had classes with. We would study together, eat together and play Settlers of Catan for hours on end (yes, just the two of us). I developed a long-standing crush on him throughout this time, off and on, based on my current romantic relationships. It was one of those things where if I was completely single, my mind would always wander back to him.

I had told him I liked him, twice, more than a year apart from each other. Both times I thought we felt the same, and both times he said I misinterpreted the situation. After realizing that I couldn’t just be friends with him unless I wanted to be miserable because he would never feel the same way, I decided to stop talking to him completely. 

This playlist represents how maybe, in another life, things could have been different. It’s filled with songs of longing, regret, and nostalgia. 

“waiting room”

Out of my entire Spotify playlist repertoire, there are a few that were created to be listened to in order—this is one of them.

Here’s how it played out: I had been out of this “situationship” for a couple months, but it had ended quite unexpectedly over a lunch where he said that he wasn’t over his ex-girlfriend (ouch). I tried not to think about him at all, and it was just starting to work, when I ran into him in the waiting room of the University of Colorado Boulder medical center. The small talk was awkward and forced, like we hadn’t known each other at all. 

This playlist actually starts with the song “Waiting Room” by Phoebe Bridgers, then goes into a storyline told through song about how I would’ve liked to feel if the end of this relationship had been on my terms rather than his. It’s a complete representation of the five stages of grief—something I felt like I didn’t get to experience because of its sudden end. To be honest, it’s been over a year and I’m still not sure I’m over this one… but at least I have a playlist for it.

“not you again!”

This is a pretty general playlist that can be applied to a lot of different situations from my life. It’s that moment when you think you’ve moved on or there’s someone that you never imagined yourself in a relationship with… then you imagine it and can’t stop thinking about it. 

While it’s annoying that someone keeps protruding your mind, you’re also somewhat welcoming the distraction. These songs are a hodgepodge of lovey-dovey, denial and the feeling of “what am I doing?”

“what are you waiting for”

This playlist is the more sad and angsty version of the “i’m in love with you and you probably know that” playlist. In high school, I guess I liked to be lovestruck. In college, all I wanted was just to have someone like me back. That’s an exhausting weight to carry, especially when it’s clear that not everyone is meant for you and vice versa. This is something I’ve thankfully since learned in my life, which makes this playlist very hard to listen to now. 

The contents of this playlist can be best described with the title of the playlist along with its following description: what are you waiting for, or am I just not what you wanted?

“ymmtmtyek”

These next two playlists were made because I wanted to look edgy and mysterious. They’re acronyms for different situations, and luckily so much time has passed that I don’t care about sharing them now.

ymmtmtyek stands for “you mean more to me than you’ll ever know.” This playlist is about the end of my first relationship, where I feel like I completely botched the breakup. While I did what was best for me in the moment, I never considered their feelings or let them have a chance to speak, which I regretted. To cope with that feeling, I created this playlist to show how much I did care about them, and it’s meant to be listened to in order. The songs start out as someone falling in love, realizing that’s no longer the case, and the aftermath of those feelings.

This playlist is probably one of the saddest I have—and that’s saying a lot. It holds a lot of unsettled emotion, and it still makes me wish that I had done something different. At the same time, it’s also a reminder to learn from what happened.  

“wicbiwybwywm?”

This playlist was created days before I went abroad my first semester of junior year. I’d been seeing someone, somewhat casually, but it was kept that way on purpose because we both knew I was leaving. We had talked about long distance and had decided against it. In the end, we agreed that once I got back, we would see how things were. 

Being very into him at the time, I was so confident that I was going to want to see him again. That being said, the ball was fully in his court. I created the playlist “wicbiwybwywm?” as a representation of this situation: “when I come back, I’ll want you, but will you want me?” 


The songs are equally about longing and some kind of acceptance that there’s a great chance we’d forget about each other a month in. Unfortunately, this situation played out the latter—where I was actually ghosted and unadded on virtually everything randomly during that semester, just to see him on Hinge the following semester. And yes, I did make another playlist to answer the question from the playlist, called “no, you won’t.”

Final reflection

Simply writing this piece brought out way more emotion in me than I thought. It just goes to show how music makes a situation so raw, even though it happened long ago. There’s always that part of me that wonders if I could’ve done something different, but I’m learning to not dwell on those questions and remember that each experience has brought me to this point in my life. 

Still, I’m hoping that there will be less playlists like these in the future.

Content written by various anonymous CU Boulder writers