Author’s Note: A few weeks ago, I was asked by a major women’s publication to write about the one who got away and the lessons learned. Unfortunately, the publication wasn’t able to run the piece, so I have decided to post it here. When you’re finished, please head over to Theroot.com and read my latest piece on LeBron James, brotherhood and the way it’s depicted today – “‘More Than A Game’ is About More Than LeBron”. Now without further ado….

That’s how long it will take for me to make her mine. I play the friend role, occupying myself with other women, allowing her to confide in me about other men. Our friendship has an aroma of something more and continues until one night we can taste it. We find ourselves on the phone drifting away from conversations of others to conversations about us. Together. And then, it all happens so fast: We become a couple, she moves from her Oakland home to be with me in my New York City apartment, and we go through the ups and downs most people must endure when they’ve made a move too quickly. Ten months. That’s how long it will take for us to break up, messily, and her to move out. This is how I know life is not fair.

I never knew my ex-girlfriend was the one who got away until she went away and didn’t come back. Strange how when she was in my life, I acted like she wasn’t the one, and how in the end, that is probably the reason why she left me. After all, if I knew then, what I know now, I wouldn’t be writing about the one who got away on a blog entitled, Until I Get Married because she would still be with me and yes, we might have been married. But that was then. This is now. The details of our journey from the rich hills of love to the slums of resentment aren’t nearly as important as my final destination – a dead end of sorrow, where I learned all the lessons of losing the one. This is the first: She is the one who got away for a reason; she goes away for good. She is not the one who goes away and comes back a little later. As badly as we want to be back with the one, we can’t, and no amount of words will make this possible, which is lesson number two.

No woman wants to be the one who got away; she wants to be the one who stays. Of course I told my ex I regretted all that I did to make her leave, but it was too little too late. As a matter of fact it gave her even more reason to keep it moving. A woman knows she’s the one who got away; it’s something they believe in their heart. So when a man tells her this, she has even more incentive to move on much like my ex has, with a new man and a new life. Finding out my ex moved on was what brought me to my last and final lesson, which is this: I put my ex where she belongs, in the past, and though the scars are still there, I refuse to let them be nothing more than evidence of my experience. All of us can have one who goes away (we should be so lucky to ever have loved like that in the first place), but in the end, we must back out of sorrowful dead ends, make room for the one for us, and make sure that one doesn’t go the way of the last one. It’s taken me two years to learn these lessons.