Do you have an ex who feels like a sliding doors for how your life might have been? It’s one of the most common love dilemmas and it can haunt people for years. A guest writer tells Capsule how she finally let go of ‘the one that got away’.
Welcome to our series, The Love Diaries – a space for you to share your experiences, advice, fairy-tale endings, setbacks and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences with love – from the woman who cheated on her husband with a work colleague, one woman’s temptation now the love of her life is finally single (although she’s not), and the woman who forced her husband to choose between her and his girlfriend.
“In another life, I would be your girl. We keep all our promises, be us against the world. In another life, I would make you stay. So I don’t have to say you were the one that got away”. Katy Perry’s 2011 song says it best. But I too – and I’m sure numerous others – have thought at length about The One That Got Away.
‘I spent more than 10 years indulging my thinking about The One That Got Away’
As in, the one you could have or should have ended up with, but something just got in the way: timing, location, life events, the people around you, etc. The core of this idea is that, if only the stars had aligned, you would be together now and blissfully happy. Or there’s the more self-critical version: ‘if only I had done something differently, we would be together now and blissfully happy’.
I spent more than 10 years indulging my thinking about The One That Got Away. No, I didn’t think about him every day, but it was quite often. When I experienced major life events or big celebrations, or when I saw or heard something that reminded me of him, I used to think about how life would look if we were still together. I’d ask myself: what would we be doing right now? Would we have got married? Would we have kids? Where would we be living? Would we still be as in love as we were once?
Right Person, Wrong Timing?
We met while we in our 20s, knew each other for years through mutual friends, then were together for nearly a year-and-a-half. That may not sound like a long time, but the length of a relationship isn’t always correlated with the depth of love you feel. The love I felt for him was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It was the feeling that you read about in books and see in romcoms but think that you may never experience.
So why didn’t we stay together? It was goddamn timing. Our lives and careers were taking us on different paths – to different countries, different continents. We were both so career-focused that we weren’t willing to prioritise one person’s career at the expense of the other person’s. We weren’t the kind of people (call it ‘main-character syndrome,’ if you like) who could trail around the world after the other one – and doing so might mean that one of us would end up resenting the other person. It felt like there was no scenario that would work.
What made the break-up so frustrating at the time, and what bothered me afterwards, was that it wasn’t due to lack of love. To have to break up because of timing, distance etc, was, to me, much harder than if we’d broken up for the ‘usual reasons’ – as in, just realising you’re not right for each other. And so I never really got closure. In fact, I sometimes thought that maybe one day we might get back together if the stars aligned and all that.
And guess what. We’re married now!
Gotcha. Nope, not to each other, but to other people.
How I Moved On From My Ex
Not long ago, something that I learned about my ex was an ‘aha’ moment for me. I finally realised that we would never have worked long-term. That our personalities and personal challenges were too similar in some ways. Basically, I think each of us needed a partner who was something of a grounding force. We were simply not what the other needed, then or now.
That realisation made me kind of laugh at myself – in particular, at my long-standing thought of ‘oh if the timing had been different, it would have worked’. Because my train of thought should have been more like ‘oh if the timing had been different, if our lifestyles had been different, if our temperaments had been different, and if multiple other factors had been different, then of course it would have worked!’. Which is clearly nonsensical, as the totality of those things mean it wouldn’t have worked. My notion of The One That Got Away had been an illusion. I don’t read romance novels, but I’d been letting one live in my head rent-free.
I did some reading about The One That Got Away, and found I’m definitely not alone. One survey of 1000 people found that over 70 percent of people think about The One That Got Away. It seems that a) our brains are wired to reminisce about the past and we may have rose-tinged flashbacks.
It seems that b) some of us are driven by wanting to fix the past in some way. And it seems that c) framing someone as The One That Got Away could potentially undermine current or future romantic relationships because you’re comparing them to him. A, b and c all applied to me at some point.
But the main thing I remember reading was that ‘The One That Got Away, got away for a reason’. I don’t believe in the ‘everything happens for a reason’ mantra, but I do believe that each outcome can be traced back to its causal factors. So if you split up, there’s a reason, and probably a good reason.
So rather than The One That Got Away, I now think of my ex as The One That Got Away For A Reason. And us parting means that, down the track, I’m with a partner who didn’t get away, because he is right for me. My ex? Not so much.
