Rachel and Ross from Friends. Hank and Karen from Californication. Ted and Robin from How I Met Your Mother. We relate to these popular love stories because most of us have at least one person from our past that we consider “the one that got away.”

Even I do –at least I used to.

For this story, we’ll call him Shawn. We met in the most cliche way possible: when our eyes locked across the crowded dance floor at a club on Queen Street West that no longer exists. I was twenty-two and he was twenty-five. We clicked instantly and spent the rest of the night and well into the morning, sitting on a park bench in front of a 24-hour Jamaican restaurant talking. It felt like we’d known each forever even though we’d just met (I’d later learn that he felt the same when he met me). After that night, songs that I’d never paid much attention to started to make sense. I was feeling things I’d never felt before and falling fast for Shawn.

I know Shawn had feelings for me too, but thanks to a combination of complicated life circumstances, bad timing and the fact that we were both young, Shawn and I never became a full-fledged couple. We parted ways, but I never forgot him. Quite the contrary — I couldn’t forget him.

For the next few years, I compared everyone I met to Shawn. Now that I’m older and marginally wiser, I can now see just how much I allowed the ghost of a relationship past haunt my love life. But at the time, I let the unresolved feelings I had for my ex to keep me at a standstill; unable to move forward or be fully present in my relationships. I was living in my very own version of the Solange song, T.O.N.Y, “I could have been in love by now,” if only I’d got out of my own way.

If you’ve ever felt hung up on an ex, you’re not alone. Per a recent survey by a UK pharmaceutical website Superdrug, longing for “the one that got away” is quite common. After surveying nearly 1,000 people about their previous relationships, they found that nearly three quarters of people surveyed think about their ex regularly and now consider them the perfect match.

In my experience, getting over an ex is so much easier if you don’t have reminders of them easily accessible. However, social media makes it much more difficult to go cold turkey after a relationship ends. The same survey found that 43% of people still communicate with the one that got away, and nearly two-thirds keep tabs on their ex on social media.

Superdrug also found women who frequently talked to their exes were twice as likely to ditch their current relationship than those who weren’t on speaking terms. The opposite sex was even more eager. Half of men who frequently stayed in touch with their exes said they would break up their current relationship to return to the “one that got away.” In addition, more than half said they would have sex with this other person if there were no consequences.

While these statistics may be unsettling for some, they’re not particularly surprising. It’s human nature to want what we can’t have. It’s easy to obsess over someone from the past when we don’t have to deal with them in the present. When it comes to my own ex, I idealized his positive qualities and chose to selectively ignore the reasons why the relationship failed in the first place.

I’m not here to be the thought police. Fantasize about whoever you want. But if it starts to interfere with your current relationship, it might be time for a reality check. It could be that “the one that got away” got away for a reason.

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