For me,it was chances never taken,risks never thought of,now at 70,regretting never marrying when I should have, and having kids,had I done so, possible Grand Children now. Wife of 27 years has been gone one year and a day now,good times, but the hour before sleep has all the bad memories come to visit..........

Yes, she is a year older than I. We became best friends in middle school and while in high school we still talked with each other while dating others. Despite being at different colleges and not dating we met, and because of age, did everything except copulate. She then got her PhD at an elite U and I got my second Bachelors at the first U in the world to have a polymer engineering department. Her and I still exchange a couple of emails a year.

After my last divorce, I had such memories of three different ladies from the distant past. I looked each of them up .... Long story short .... Yikes!!, Yikes!!, and Yikes!!!

Maybe there really was a good reason it didn't work out.

I dunno that I'd say he "got away" more like he stayed away. He lived in CA and was supposed to move to Omaha. Everyone said moving would be a good step, including his Mom. I gave him some financial assistance to move. And then Mom didn't feel so well, and then his car was hit and totalled, or so he said. When it was good it was soooo very very good. My heart was broken, my job was ending, and I had to move. It was a really hard time. I found a new job really quickly, heard from him once more 2 years later when I moved into the house I'm in now. Which is why I will never again do long distance. With interest rates what they are I figure he owes me around $10,000 now.

Yup. But no - probably wouldn't have lasted , due to his drinking.

It was a mighty fine trip while it lasted though ...
I'll never forget it.

Not really. For me, the things that ended needed to.

I don't get really worked up over fantasies or longings. I'm pretty practical about what is, and what is not.

Someone always seems to hold that space, and I'm trying to address that issue. I believe it's kept me from really experiencing fulfilling, healthy intimate relationships for too much of my adult life.

There are many who occupy space in my heart. Fortunately space used in a heart does not diminish the space still left. I sometimes wonder if they still wonder about me. The only one that hurts is the one I still hang out with. To be so close but not closer.

Yes, there is one; but when I think about her, it occurs to me that, being who I am, had we stayed together any longer, I would have found a way to screw it up somehow.

I always think of "the one that got away" as just another way of sayign "an old unrequited love".

Yep. 10 years later there is not a day that I don't think about her.

I would say if they got a way they weren't the right one

Wow.. I had one who ruined me for all other girls throughout high school. When my long marriage ended, I looked her up. We eventually spent some serious time together … mutually concluding, ‘we’re not compatible.’ We remain close friends, and that’s amazingly wonderful, but she’d have been the one that got away. As is ..nice to actually know

I was involved with someone with entanglements from a previous relationship. It wasn't so much that he still wanted her, as he wanted to maintain leverage and control in her life. She kept saying she was going to have the problem resolved, but never did and I transferred.

There's a beautifully-written section about this very subject by, of all people, Lemmy from Motorhead in his autobiography, in which he talks about a woman he met and fell completely in love with years ago. She left him before the relationship had got very far, but he remained in love with her and to him she became the most perfect person that ever lived because he would always remember her as what he hoped for - though deep down he knew she wasn't, and that had it continued their relationship would not have been as perfect as he dreamed either,