"Shouldn't" is a small word doing a lot of damage. Someone who had really moved on would say the past doesn't matter. The speaker of «Those Shouldn't Matter Anymore» keeps saying it *shouldn't*. That modal verb is an admission. It names a rule the speaker is trying to obey and, by the final stanza, can't. The poem is about the gap between what we think we ought to feel after a relationship falls apart and what we actually feel. Its central idea is that caring doesn't switch off just because we've decided it should.
The first three stanzas run on a strict pattern: two lines of memory, then the refrain. The memories move in an interesting order. First come "goals and plans," which belong to a shared future. Then "promises," which are commitments. Last are "compliments," which are words about the other person. The poem moves from what the couple would build, to what they swore, to what they said about each other. The phrase "Only to" sours the last two. "Only to break them?" and "Only to find out our true selves?" turn each kind gesture into a setup for disappointment. "True selves" is deliberately ambiguous. Either the compliments were flattering fictions and the real people turned out to be less lovable, or the real people were always there and the praise just covered them. The poem doesn't say, and the vagueness makes the hurt feel more real.
Notice, too, that the memory lines end in question marks. The speaker is cross-examining the past, challenging each memory before dismissing it. The refrain then arrives as a flat verdict: "Those shouldn't matter anymore." It has a falling, seven-syllable rhythm, like a lesson recited or a mantra repeated. The poem has no rhyme and no decoration, so repetition does the work that rhyme usually would. The refrain is the only music here, and its job is persuasion. When we repeat something three times, we're usually trying to convince ourselves.
The fourth stanza is where the persuasion starts to wear thin. "Even though we're now mean to each other" uses a plain, almost playground word, "mean," and the bluntness gives the hurt an unpolished honesty. The stanza has two "nows" ("we're now," "We now have"), as if the speaker is hammering a line between then and now. Then the refrain shrinks to "That shouldn't matter." "Those" has become "That," so the separate memories have collapsed into one lump. "Anymore," the word that claimed something had ended, has vanished. The sentence is shorter and less sure of itself.
In the last stanza the refrain disappears altogether. Three questions replace it: "Yet why do I care? / Why do you care? / Why does it matter?" The pronouns matter here. Until now the poem spoke in "we," and even the angry fourth stanza keeps it. Now "I" and "you" stand on separate lines, and the grammar acts out the separation the speaker has been trying to shrug off. The middle question is the most revealing. The speaker can't know that the other person cares, but assumes it, and that could be hope, accusation, or both. Either way, the speaker finds some comfort in the thought that the hurt is shared. The final line borrows the refrain's verb, "matter," but turns it from a command into a question, and the poem ends without an answer.
The poem's significance lies in this broken pattern. It builds a rhythm of three, so we expect the refrain a fourth and fifth time, and the structure gives way in the same way the speaker's self-control does. Its language is simple enough that anyone who has ever told themselves to "get over it" will recognise the voice. It also doesn't take sides. The "we" who made the promises is the same "we" who is "mean to each other," so the blame falls on both people or neither. What stays with the reader is the honesty of the question at the end. Telling yourself something shouldn't matter is the surest proof that it does.