We met when we were about 16 years old. We were three friends dating three guys. We shared years of outings, trips, movie nights, birthdays, and summers that seemed never to end.
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I was the first to end my relationship and, without looking for it, I fell in love with my friend’s boyfriend. His name was Andrés. We fell in love unintentionally. It was a magical, crazy, uncontrollable love. When we revealed it, he talked to his girlfriend and I talked to my friend. I told her the truth, that I had fallen in love with him. She told me she loved him and that she would do whatever it took to stay by his side. I told her I was not going to compete with her or try to convince him to leave her. Amid all the pain and complexity of that, it seemed the most loyal thing I could do.
After that conversation, I went to look for him. I didn’t want to convince him of anything, but I needed to hear it from him to be able to close that chapter. When we were face to face, he told me he couldn’t leave his girlfriend, and I felt as if my soul sank to the bottom of the earth. We were only 18 years old, and I thought I would go crazy with sorrow. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and when I managed to sleep, I dreamed about him all night.
But at 18, decisions don’t always last as long as one would like. We tried to stay away, but we couldn’t. We met again in secret, started going out and talking on the phone all night until the birds began to sing at dawn. We loved each other, but life seemed determined to separate us.
Time passed and one day I met a new love, a love just for me, with no third parties involved. I started a long relationship and, little by little, Andrés and I drifted apart.
Ten years later we met again in a bar. He told me he had just separated and asked me what I was going to do with that new reality, but it was already too late for me. I had been married for less than a year and dreamed of becoming a mother.
We lost track of each other again. I learned that shortly after, he also got married and life went on for both of us. However, during all those years I kept dreaming about him many times. In those dreams, we looked into each other’s eyes, but we never managed to be together.
My marriage was a good marriage, but a part of me was always trapped in that unfinished love. Years later, in a spiritual therapy session, I was told that maybe I had never fully given myself to my husband because a part of my heart was still tied to another man. Then I thought of Andrés. Decades had passed, but something of that love from when we were 18 had never completely gone away.
Curiously, that same week I ran into him at a traffic light. Each of us was in our own car, we greeted each other, exchanged a few words, and when the light turned green, I felt that we no longer had anything to do with each other. I wished him a good life. We didn’t exchange phone numbers or anything like that, but for years I kept thinking about him and hoping to find him again.
Sometimes I looked for him on social media and never found him. We were still friends on Facebook, but neither of us had used it for years. Until this summer I realized that story was still taking up space in me and I decided to look for him. I didn’t want to keep carrying something I felt was unfinished.
One night I remembered it was his birthday. It was just a few minutes before midnight, I went on his Facebook and saw that someone had just congratulated him and he had replied. Then I knew that, finally, I had found him.
I wrote to him, he replied the next day, and I suggested having coffee. A week later we met for lunch. Almost thirty years had passed since we had fallen in love. We talked for six hours; we didn’t even eat. I felt happy, calm, completely at ease. We struggled to hold each other’s gaze until I told him why I had looked for him: I needed him to give me back my heart.
He took my hands and said, “I give you back your heart.” We reviewed our lives and also our story. We even talked about what had remained unanswered for so many years: what would have happened if we had stayed together. He had been separated for a couple of years and we both had two teenage children. We agreed to see each other again someday, if I separated. We said goodbye without knowing if that would happen.
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That afternoon I returned home happy to have closed something pending and to have been honest with someone who had been so important to me. But that night I couldn’t sleep. In the following days, I kept going back to his words, his eyes, his voice. What I thought I had closed with that meeting was still open.
At the same time, my marriage was going through one of its many crises. Apathy, silence, and distance had become part of our life. A week after seeing Andrés again, I made a decision I had thought impossible for years: I was going to separate. I had always thought I would grow old with my husband, that our life would continue like that until the end. But for the first time, I could imagine myself outside that marriage and understood that I didn’t want to keep living that way. After twenty years together, I decided to end our relationship.
I didn’t feel like I was separating because of Andrés. However, seeing him again forced me to look at my marriage differently and to recognize something I had been avoiding for a long time: we were no longer happy together. My husband didn’t want to separate and told me that if that was what I wanted, I should leave. I wasn’t willing to leave my home or my children. So we continued sharing a bed while trying to understand how to move forward and how to tell the children and the family.
Days passed and I wrote to Andrés again. He had also been thinking about me. We started talking every day, still as friends, because I wanted to give myself time to understand what was happening with my marriage. But nothing changed and finally I took off my ring. That’s how the second season of our love story began.
We met in parks while our children were at school, still afraid someone would see us. We resumed a story that had been suspended for almost thirty years.
We were happy. We couldn’t stop thinking about each other, talked about everything, supported each other in everyday life, and he was also present during my separation. Everything moved very fast. While I was trying to close twenty years of marriage, I was beginning to build something with Andrés.
There were moments when those two lives overlapped and I struggled to understand what I was living. But there was also something I was very clear about: for the first time, I could live that story without either of us being 18 and without a friend in the middle. Until things started to get complicated.
There was less time, fewer spaces, and more obligations. We were still happy when we were together, but I started to feel insecure. The messages began to space out and feel more distant. We had come from very intense months and had barely had time to ask ourselves what we were doing.
We had postponed a special outing for weeks and finally left it for my birthday. An hour before meeting, he called to tell me his plans had changed and he had to go pick up his son.
I cried like that first time. I wrote to him that he could have broken my heart any other day, but not that one. I told him that if this wasn’t reciprocal, I preferred to leave it there. I thanked him for everything we had lived.
The next day he replied that he had never wanted to break my heart, that he was sorry, and that he also appreciated everything we had shared. Later I regretted ending everything that way. I understood that I had reacted out of fear. I invited him for coffee and he said no. I asked if we could talk later. He never replied again.
Days and weeks have passed, and it still hurts. I keep thinking about him and needing an answer to help me understand what happened to us. Did fear win? Did the intensity overwhelm us? Or did we simply reach as far as we could? What I still find hard to accept is having to let go, again, of this love story.
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