Perhaps more destructive are memories of “the one that got away.” It is common for people to have someone in their pasts whom they recall with longing and regret, someone to whom they adversely compare all subsequent relationships. This person can be a parent, a first love, or a friend no longer here. Their perfection, like that of a funeral eulogy, is a function of selective memory that can no longer be tested by daily contact. They exist in a sort of distracting dream with which the people now in our lives cannot compete.
