We were both married. We had no business falling in love with each other. Everything about it had to be hidden, which made it feel almost sinful—like we had stepped into a life we weren’t supposed to be living.
And yet, somehow, something that felt so wrong also became one of the most beautiful things I had ever experienced.
It started so innocently that sometimes I still can’t believe where it eventually took us.
I saw something he had liked online and sent him a message. I was bored. That was really it.
We had known each other 20 years earlier when we worked together, although my memories of that time are surprisingly vague. Apparently, we had gone to a movie together. Apparently, we had even made out once.
I remembered almost none of it.
So when I reached out after all those years, I wasn’t looking for love. I thought we would talk about the past, laugh about things we barely remembered, and maybe become friends again.
There was absolutely no part of me that thought one little message was about to change my life.
Then the next morning, he remembered I had a test.
“Good luck on your test.”
Such a simple sentence.
But I remember something shifting inside me when I read it.
It was small. Almost insignificant.
But maybe that’s the strange thing about falling in love. Sometimes you don’t recognize the beginning when you’re standing in it.
And Then We Saw Each Other Again
Twenty years had passed since we had last been in the same room.
I expected awkwardness.
Instead, when we saw each other, we hugged.
Not one of those polite hugs you give someone you haven’t seen in years. We held each other as though it was completely natural. There was no hesitation and no uncomfortable moment of figuring out what we were supposed to do.
It felt strangely familiar.
Almost like our bodies remembered something our minds had forgotten.
After that, we started texting constantly.
Morning. Afternoon. Night.
There was always something else to say.
And when there wasn’t, we somehow found something.
We couldn’t get enough of each other.
What made it even more intoxicating was realizing that neither one of us was experiencing it alone. We were falling at the same time, with almost the same intensity.
There is something incredibly powerful about discovering that the person you cannot stop thinking about cannot stop thinking about you either.
It becomes its own little world.
And for a while, we lived inside of it.
What Falling in Love Actually Feels Like
I don’t think I understood how physically powerful love could be until then.
It wasn’t just an emotion.
I felt it everywhere.
I used to describe it as though there were little doves living inside my heart. I would wake up happy for absolutely no reason other than knowing he existed.
I smiled constantly.
I couldn’t concentrate.
Normal life almost felt like an inconvenience because it kept interrupting the only thing I really wanted to do—which was be near him.
There were moments when we would simply look at each other and it felt like the rest of the world disappeared.
He once told me he could breathe me in and still never get enough of me.
If I got up to go to the bathroom, he’d tell me to hurry because he already missed me.
It sounds ridiculous when written down.
Maybe all great love sounds a little ridiculous to people who aren’t inside of it.
But when you’re the one experiencing it, nothing feels more real.
We made promises.
We imagined futures.
We learned each other’s habits, flaws, insecurities, moods, and quirks. Two very different people tried to figure out how to fit into each other’s lives.
And for a long time, I believed that the intensity of loving someone that much meant it had to last.
I know now that those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Love Can Be Real and Still End
That’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve learned.
A relationship doesn’t have to have been fake simply because it failed.
People can genuinely love each other and still hurt each other.
They can once be unable to imagine spending a day apart and eventually become people who can no longer figure out how to stay together.
That’s what happened to us.
There wasn’t one single moment when everything changed.
It happened slowly.
The intensity that once felt effortless became harder to hold onto. Little things became bigger things. Misunderstandings became arguments. Hurt accumulated on top of hurt.
We both said things.
We both did things.
And somewhere between loving each other and trying desperately not to lose each other, we began damaging the very thing we were trying to save.
Something that had once made me happier than I knew a person could feel eventually became something that hurt.
And after four years, it ended.
Nobody Tells You About This Part of Love
People talk endlessly about falling in love.
There are movies about it.
Songs about it.
Books about it.
We celebrate the beginning because the beginning is beautiful.
But nobody really prepares you for what happens when a person becomes woven into the fabric of your everyday life and then suddenly isn’t there anymore.
Because losing someone you deeply love isn’t simply losing a relationship.
It’s losing hundreds of tiny things at once.
It’s losing the person you automatically reach for when something funny happens.
It’s losing the messages you expected to see on your phone.
It’s losing familiar arms around you.
It’s losing inside jokes, routines, nicknames, plans, places, songs, memories and versions of the future that existed only because that person was supposed to be standing beside you in them.
And perhaps worst of all, the person you would normally turn to when you’re hurting is the person you’re hurting because you lost.
That is a very particular kind of loneliness.
The Cruel Mathematics of Love
If there were some emotional scale capable of measuring these things, I know exactly what mine would say.
The high I experienced while falling in love doesn’t even come close to the pain I feel from losing it.
And that’s something I never understood when this began.
I knew relationships could end.
Of course I did.
But intellectually knowing that heartbreak exists and actually experiencing the disappearance of someone who became part of your emotional world are completely different things.
Love expands your life.
Loss leaves you standing inside all that extra space.
Maybe that’s why heartbreak feels so enormous.
The deeper someone becomes embedded in your routines, thoughts, memories, identity, and expectations for the future, the more places their absence eventually has to live.
If I Could Go Back
Sometimes I imagine being able to return to the day I sent that first message.
I imagine standing beside that version of myself who had absolutely no idea what she was about to begin.
I would want to warn her.
I would tell her:
You’re about to experience a kind of happiness you didn’t know existed.
You’re going to love someone so much that simply seeing his name on your phone will change your entire mood.
You’re going to feel wanted.
You’re going to feel understood.
You’re going to laugh.
You’re going to make memories that you’ll carry for the rest of your life.
You’re going to believe you’ve found something extraordinary.
But I would also have to tell her the rest.
One day, it will end.
And when it does, you’re going to discover that the human heart is capable of hurting far more than you ever imagined.
You’re going to miss things you never thought to appreciate while they were happening.
You’re going to wish you could have one ordinary day back—not even one of the extraordinary ones.
Just one day when everything was still okay.
And then I would have to decide whether to stop her.
That’s the question I can’t answer.
Because part of me thinks I would grab that phone out of her hand and say:
Don’t send the message.
Protect yourself.
Keep living the life you knew before you knew what this kind of love felt like.
Because you cannot grieve something you never had.
But another part of me knows exactly what would happen.
She would send it anyway.
Maybe That’s the Price
Maybe that’s what makes love so scary.
There is no way to experience the deepest parts of it without accepting the possibility of eventually experiencing the deepest parts of loss.
The same memories that once made you smile can become the ones that make you cry.
The places that once felt special can become places you avoid.
The songs that once belonged to two people suddenly belong to a past that no longer exists.
And the person who once made the world feel fuller can leave behind an emptiness almost exactly the size of the love that used to be there.
Would I have chosen differently if I had known?
Some days, absolutely.
Some days the pain makes me wish I had never experienced any of it.
I wish I could go back to being the woman who hadn’t sent that message yet—the woman who didn’t know what she was about to gain, because she also didn’t know what she would eventually have to lose.
But then I remember what it felt like to love someone that deeply.
And what it felt like to be loved that way in return.
And that’s where the answer becomes complicated.
Because maybe the tragedy of losing a great love isn’t that loving them was a mistake.
Maybe the tragedy is simply that something can be completely real, unbelievably beautiful, and still not last forever.
And perhaps that’s why, even knowing exactly how this story ends, I’m still not entirely sure I could stop myself from beginning it.
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