So I don’t have to say
You were the one that got away
The one that got away.”---Katy Perry
When we’re young and foolish---and inexperienced---there should be someplace we can go for good advice. True we have parents, grandparents and assorted relatives only too eager to disperse the pearls of wisdom they have accumulated over the ages, but there is one problem with that---they’re not cool. Sophisticated maybe, wise in the ways of making a living or playing the bassoon, but not cool as defined by the Teenage Book of Assessments.
Our friends are cool, of course, and just as ready to tell us what to do, but we can see by the way they conduct their own lives that they are naive, rash and perhaps insane, not that there is anything wrong with that as long as it doesn’t infringe upon our own existence. So that leaves us with exactly no one particularly qualified to provide guidance on new things which crop up in our lives like puberty, the opposite sex and romance. What we really needed in such perilous times was a primitive neighborhood street booth manned twelve hours a day by a reputable sage who clearly understood our various dilemmas---sort of like Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip. Short of that, we were on our own. Looking back, that should have been very, very scary. Considering our powers of analysis and decisions made in haste, we’re lucky we got out alive, let alone lost a few girlfriends/boyfriends along the way. Is it too late to request a do-over?
Candidates
We think it’s fairly safe to say that our quirky high-school decision-making apparatus might have been suspect. Bill Killeen was accepted by Harvard, after all, but chose to meander across the country to attend Oklahoma State University in Gooberland. A brilliant friend flunked out of MIT after one year (which most of us would do), gave up on higher education and became a potato farmer in Maine. In college, my first dormmate became overly homesick for Indiana, if such a thing is possible, and left school after two months. If these things don’t seem entirely rational to you, welcome to the club. Should these people be trusted at this stage of confusion to make even more important decisions on who to mate with for life? Probably not. On the other hand, my sister Kathy married her teenage one-and-only John Scanlon right out of high school and the two of them celebrated their 50th anniversary last year. But perhaps that’s the notorious exception which proves the rule.
Despite all this, many of us fondly remember someone from our first 17 or so years as The One That Got Away. Maybe that’s because the first time for everything is exciting and memorable and usually has no strings attached. It’s easier for relationships to be perfect the more short-lived they are. In Still Life With Woodpecker, Tom Robbins says “When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up.” And then we mourn the relationship lost. Maybe the object of our affection forever becomes The One That Got Away.
More likely, The One arrives a little later during the college years, our first semblance of employment, the marriage of a friend. We consider ourselves wiser now, urbane citizens of the world, better evaluators of talent, but the truth is we are still as dumb as an Idaho congressman when it comes to the opposite sex. Someone can be perfect for a week, maybe three, then suddenly the coins fall from our eyes at some minor transgression, leaving us dazed and confused. “Good grief, me golden idol is tarnished!” as the kid says watching the phone booth where Wonder Wart Hog is changing back to Philbert Desanex. Have we made a mistake here? Is a reevaluation in order? It’s impossible to hide our disappointment. Sensing the abrupt reversal of form, our heretofore beloved slips off into the ethers on that midnight train to Georgia, never to return, thus elevating his/her S&P bond rating to Triple A. The escapee now and forever becomes The One That Got Away. Aw, shucks.
Anecdotal Evidence
Eventually most fruit matures and becomes useful, as do we. Older and wiser, we realize such things as compromise and sacrifice are required now and then if a relationship is to succeed, things we wish a Lucy had told us much earlier. Our choices for a successful partnership are better considered, unhurried, allowed to develop over time and we are happier with the results. When disagreements and disappointments occur, we tackle them like reasonable adults, argue the merits of our predilections, hash out acceptable solutions and don’t hold grudges. But married or not, cohabitant or non, satisfied with life or riding boxcars, there are times when the swirling eddies of time open up a break in the clouds and there he or she is, floating through our memory banks---The One That Got Away.
“I was going through a rugged period in my marriage,” testifies Evan, an attorney from Etobicoke, Ontario. “I felt we would work our way through it but there was a lot of animosity between us and we decided to live separately for awhile. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I couldn’t help thinking of Darla, my old college sweetheart from 30 years ago. I even got in the car one day and drove eight hours to the Chicago suburbs just to sit outside her old house. I didn’t even know if she still lived there but I knew she once loved me unconditionally. I was behaving like a desperate fool, but I couldn’t help it. I felt that once there was someone perfect for me. For all I knew, she might now be an oversized dockworker with bad teeth, but I still saw her as she was 30 years ago. I sat there and cried for half an hour, then I drove home. My wife and I worked it out, but I still think about losing Darla. Stupid…I know…but the truth.”
Gregory, a lifetime New Yorker had this to say: “I met a woman while browsing the new books at Brentano’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan several years ago…she just walked over and asked me if I was going to buy the novel I was riffing through. ‘It’s the last copy in the store,’ she said. ‘I’d like to buy it if you don’t.’ I was a little put off by her forwardness but I handed over the book. ‘Be my guest,’ I said. On my way out of the shop, she came over, handed me a card and said ‘Here’s my information. Call me and I’ll buy you a coffee for stealing your novel.’ Since she looked like Veronica Hamell, I called her the next day and a four-month relationship ensued. ‘Veronica’ was perfect for me. I liked everything about her, especially her brash willingness to try risky endeavors, something previously alien to me. Everything was great, I thought we’d go on forever. Then one day out of a clear blue sky, she came to my place and said, ‘I just got a new job in D.C. It’s perfect, I couldn’t turn it down. Want to come?’ Even though I had a mere dead-end job of my own in Brooklyn and could have found another easily in Washington, I balked. If you’ve ever gotten the feeling you’re driving too fast, you’ll understand. Veronica went by herself, thrived in her new setting and is now someone most of you have heard of. Of course, I’ve never met anyone else like her and I never will. Maybe if I’d gone, her supersonic career would have left me in the dust anyway, but I’d sure like a second chance to find out.
Too bad, guys, you’re history Some people never learn to hit the curve ball.
Retrospect
Reminiscing about The One That Got Away might not be good for us, but it’s the way our brains are wired, says Colorado-based clinical psychologist Jodi De Luca. “Our memories of the past give meaning to our present and our future. If the feelings associated with a particular memory are enjoyable, our brains are drawn back to visit that memory over and over again. Such is often the case with the one that got away.”
De Luca likens this affect to a sort of emotional time travel, the kind we experience when listening to a favorite song from the past. When we hear a familiar tune, it’s not unusual to suddenly be overcome by what she calls “a vivid constellation of emotions and physiological reactions even including rapid heartbeats, sweaty palms, excitement or tears, all incredibly occurring as if they were happening today.”
Unlike pop songs, however, former relationships have a tendency to be redefined by rosy retrospection. Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is based on this psychological phenomenon. According to Astroglide’s resident sexologist Dr. Jess O’Reilly, rosy retrospection is a result of remembering and judging the past more favorably than you assess the present. Over time, this distorted view “can negatively affect our experience of the present and expectation of the future. Though this cognitive bias can be positive if it helps build self-esteem, when you inaccurately recall your ex-lover’s behavior as overwhelmingly positive, it can result in distorted recollections of the relationship. These biased memories tend to become more positive over time as you defer recalling the end of the relationship and focus on the positive elements as time passes. The problem is that no one is perfect and the more you learn about them the less you tend to idealize them. With a fling, you don’t have enough time to see that side of them.”
Clinical psychotherapist Kevon Owens offers one more reason as to why we often glorify past relationships: we simply wish to right our wrongs. “Finding things that are lost, fixing what was broken…we want to make amends,” he says. “The one who got away can be a very distracting spot in the direction our life is heading because no one can be all the idealized things we wish for. In a perfect world, we’d learn and grow and move past these perceived errors, but the chances to do it with the person who got away may be gone and that can be very difficult to reconcile. The one who got away can symbolize failure in many areas.”
We romantic old fools (and yes, it’s a club I belong to) ignore the above advice and persist. Now and then, however, we run into someone with a tale that brings us up short. An old friend, let’s call him Mike, is a notorious loner not immune to the charms of the opposite sex, including an occasional “booty call.” But everyone has an Achilles Heel and for Mike, it was Sophie, a vivacious redhead who spun him around like a pinwheel. They broke up, of course, but 18 years later Mike succumbed to ennui and loneliness and decided to look her up. He found Sophie in Tacoma, of all places, and flew out to stir the embers.
“First of all, she forgot to pick me up at the airport---thought I was coming the next day. When I got a cab to her place, it was in a war zone, nasty and falling down. She weighed about 250 and wore spandex and she started undressing as soon as I walked in the door. She hesitated for a moment, went into the bedroom and put Ravel’s Bolero on her turntable. I didn’t know what to do so I feigned being ill. I couldn’t wait to get out the door. Let me tell you---in this case I was was The One That Got Away!”
That’s all, folks….
