Ethical Dilemmas is a regular column where we hope to give you clear-cut answers for complicated problems. Hayley Glaholt is a pro at carefully examining two sides of a story and weighing each move with a cautious code of morality. If you have a difficult problem you’re currently dealing with and want some free advice, send your question to heyjudeadvice@gmail.com.

Hey Hayley,

I am in a great relationship with someone I love, but I can’t stop thinking about someone from my past. He’s the one that got away, and my feelings for him are still so strong after all these years. We were together in undergrad, and we stay in touch on social media. My feelings for him are getting in the way of my current relationship, and I’m worried that means my current partner and I aren’t a good match.

(female, 27, Toronto)

Memories are generally good things, unless they get in the way of us living our lives. I am the kind of person that tends to always be in the past or the future but rarely in the present. I attribute that to having a fairly anxious mind and a low-key (i.e., deeply hidden) romantic flare.

We are always going to remember positive experiences and relationships fondly. That’s not a problem. But it sounds like you’ve gone past the point of remembering, towards fixating. This is a classic case of “the grass is always greener,” and one of the best ways to address this is to reality-test your memories in two ways: 1) Was that person and that relationship truly as perfect as you remember them to be? 2) If that same relationship took place now, with all of the stresses of adulthood casting shadows on it, would it survive?

I can think of two “ones that got away” in my life. I met one at eighteen and one at nineteen; one was a boyfriend, the other a friend. Currently, they are both married to seemingly perfect women, and they have seemingly perfect children, living in seemingly perfect homes, in seemingly perfect cities. I used “seemingly” an annoying amount of times there because who truly knows what is going on in their lives. A healthy dose of social media stalking can only tell me so much. But here’s the thing: they look HAPPY. Their lives turned out WELL. And I choose to see that as the universe telling me that they were not, in fact, ones that got away. They are ones that are exactly where they should be, with the partners they should be with.

Going back to the questions above—if I look back on those people and those relationships, if I reality- test them, I remember why they ended (or never started) in the first place. Both of these guys were life-of-the-party, charismatic, worship-able people. They were musical, so funny, and so, SO beautiful. But were they perfect? No. They were narcissistic and distracted. Was I a perfect match for either of them? No. I’m not good at worshipping and following other people’s dreams.

Experiences we have when we’re younger—especially romantic ones—are in part so special and “rose-coloured” because they happened before “real” (read: adult) life got in the way. That’s what makes them so precious. That’s why Bryan Adams says those were “the best days” of his life. In undergrad, we are fairly free to live like we want to live, to try new things, and to not worry about careers and other long-term cares. We can stay up all night with that awesome guy/girl and go to concerts and skip class because there are no serious consequences. If I did that with someone now, I would show up to work the next day exhausted and distracted and let my clients down. And that’s not what I want to do. Our priorities are different now, and therefore falling in love looks different when you’re in your late twenties or thirties—and NECESSARILY SO. That perfect little warm incubator of our youth is no longer around us, so memories with the heart-stopping qualities of those undergrad ones are harder to come by. The context for memory-making (and relationship-growing) has completely shifted.