Do You Ever Get Over the One Who Got Away? I'm Really Not So Sure

My own first love never did get away from my heart.

Published January 30, 2025

illustration of woman walking through park

Sonia Pulido

This new year, as I ponder how time goes by, I’m thinking of that great Hollywood love story — the one where Rick (Humphrey Bogart) bids Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) goodbye with a poignant “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

I sobbed when I first saw Casablanca. I was 18 and naive. Why did Rick tell Ilsa to leave when he loved her so much?

I had no idea that Casablanca was released at the start of a long-ago year — January 1943 — when World War II raged, and sacrifice often took precedence over love. As Rick so pragmatically tells the teary Ilsa: “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”

My “someday” came a few years later, when I broke up with my first love. He wanted to marry me — but the thought of marriage felt like a prison to me when I was 21. It didn’t matter how much I loved Oscar. I had my own life to lead. And yet … if I saw Oscar today, I would feel exactly as I did then: filled with innocent, impossible love.

As time goes by, we learn hard truths.

Love does not conquer all, and the fundamental things do not always apply.

Sometimes love lives on only in memory. Sometimes it morphs into friendship.

Now that I’m 68 and have loved several men, I agree with Daniel Jones, the editor of The New York Times' Modern Love column. He wrote about what he’s learned after editing the column for 20 years: “Life and love are fleeting, which is why we hold onto them so dearly.”

I have one friend who saw her high-school love again after decades, and “that feeling was still there,” she said — even though she is happily married.

I have another friend who is still friends with her college boyfriend — and she’s also good friends with his wife. She confesses she still has the urge to kiss him when she sees him — that desire is imprinted so deeply in her muscle memory.

And then there’s my pal Char, a 75-year-old widow, who met a charming man, let’s call him Parker, at a journalism convention in 1973.

“Is it possible to fall in love in three days?” Parker had written to her then.

Yes, but Char lived in Pennsylvania, and Parker lived in Arizona. They married other people … and time went by.

But a year ago, while looking through boxes, she found three love letters from Parker — and she became driven to find him.

Using her reporting skills, she found the obituary of his wife, who had died in 2016 — one month before Char’s husband, Carter, had passed away. She found the phone number of a relative, and that relative passed Char’s number on to Parker.

“We began this conversation,” Char recalls, “and just like before, he was adorable, with a wonderful sense of humor and such great intelligence.

“I wasn’t looking for romance … but I fell in love. I felt as if I was in the ocean treading water, and he came by with a lifeboat.”

After a month or so of daily talking, Parker, who still lives in Phoenix, asked if he could visit Char at her home in Delray Beach, Florida. He sent her a gift from Williams Sonoma with a note: “Do not open until I get there.”

Inside were wine glasses with their initials engraved on them. “We drank wine and clinked glasses, and he had a wonderful five days here … everything was perfect, even romantically.”

Even after 50 years, Parker’s body felt familiar, and Char didn’t feel embarrassed being intimate. He assured her: “You know, I don’t like a skinny girl.”

He also told her two things that touched her heart: “I’ve loved only two women in my life — my wife and you.” And “I can tell you things I can’t tell anyone else.”

Their relationship felt like a true rekindling — the return of the flame inside their youthful selves that never really went out.

She visited him and met his children and grandkids. And then … life became complicated. Parker is 81 and finding it difficult to travel. His daughter is not so sure she wants Char to be his main caretaker. Their second-chance love remains — but at more of a distance.

No matter what happens now, Char says, “We had 15 magical days.”

From her wise perch, she knows that another one of Daniel Jones’ lessons is true: “Relationships don’t have to last to be good.”

“There is no rule that a relationship must last a certain amount of time to count as a ‘success,’ just as one that ends hasn’t necessarily ‘failed'," Jones wrote. “Every relationship we have, short or long, can be good, essential, even transformative, and have lasting value.”

The key is to see the value in what stays — and not to nurture the sting of what went away.

Don’t keep picking the scab of a lost relationship, says my therapist, Connie Ingram of Royal Palm Beach, Florida. Don’t ruminate endlessly on “what ifs” or blame.

“Let the wound heal, let the scar form and use it as an opportunity to metamorphize into more of the person you want to be,” Connie says.

She helped me navigate the end of my 18-year marriage in 2007 and also my seven-year relationship with my boyfriend, Howard, in 2017.

My daughter Tess and I recently had dinner with Howard’s son and daughter. His son wanted us to meet his girlfriend.

I met Damien and Chloé in 2010, the year after their mother passed away. Damien was 20 and Chloé was just 13. I assured them right away: “No matter what happens between me and Papa, I will always be there for you.”

And I am. Howard and I remain friends. The lasting value of our relationship is our family — his, mine, ours, in partnership or friendship.

Our family is the love that will never go away.

Do you still remember your first love? Are you in touch? Let us know in the comments below.

Jan Tuckwood is an award-winning journalist who was associate editor and revenue content director of The Palm Beach Post for 30 years. She’s also a former fashion editor of The Denver Post, and her work has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Glamour magazine, among other publications. She is the editor of five books, including the official history book of Palm Beach County, and she is the co-author of Too Young to Be Old, the 2022 memoir of Diane Gilman, HSN’s “Jean Queen.”