The Passenger song “Let Her Go” ends its chorus by saying “Only know you love her when you let her go, and you let her go.” Odyssey, as well as Buzzfeed and other millennial media, is usually flooded with articles about this very fact. These articles include: How to best get over someone, How to find a new relationship, or How to better perfect yourself before you get back into a relationship. They never give a list to say “How to let her go even when you don’t want to.” The majority, definitely not all, are written from the female perspective. What is lacking, for a variety of reasons, is the male perspective on letting someone go, no matter what the current feelings are for that “ex.”

Now let me preface this by saying I am a 23 year old single man and by no means am I sitting here saying I know what love is or what it should feel like. What I do know however is the feeling of caring for someone so deeply that you’re a bit too confused on how to conduct yourself in the weeks after the break up. I’m also not here to sit and argue that there is one way to correctly let someone go. What I will say is that most of the people, who I will not name, that I’m writing about are still friends of mine, some are even my closest friends. For that matter I won’t be taking about specific scenarios but rather take how the situation generally went wrong.

These girls were people I met at a party, out on the town with the boys having 10 drinks when we said we’d turn in after 3, or through mutual friends who thought there might be a connection. Most of the time these women walked into my life when the last thing on my mind was a relationship and that is the beginning of the downfall. You would walk them home, maybe getting a hug or kiss on the doorstep or perhaps being invited up for the night but in the back of my mind something lingered. As the relationship grew, dates became more formal, she would either come out with the boys or the boys would bring me to find her, and people knew that there was something in the air even if we didn’t want to admit it yet. Long conversations about nothing or everything in the world while cuddling became common place, quick phone calls or texts to check on their day when you think it wasn’t the best occurred, and walls began to break. This is where you reach the point of realizing how deeply you care about this person and you reach the crossroads.

There is the obvious path of a relationship. Having a title on what you two have been casually accepting for months and beginning the reality of what is expected in a relationship in today’s society. This long trek includes attending each other’s family events, maybe moving in together, and setting down the road to possible marriage. There is the other path, however, the one of letting go. This is a path I have followed one too many times and let "the girl” slip through my hands and get away. It’s a path littered with self-doubt, anxiety, and childish excuses of “I’m too young, I need to get my career set, I’m not the best she can do.” It is here where you either grab that hand and hold it close or let that girl walk her own path kicking yourself for what happened.

This isn’t exclusive to men or boys in general but rather a general expose on the fact that most young people will let the “guy” or “girl” get away because of some childish insecurity or argument. For me it was the fear that she was settling on me because I was safe. I was freaking out since they would be living over 5 hours away for about half the year, the fact that I might be moving halfway across the country for work, or that we would just start fighting all the time because I felt trapped. Commitment issues aside, most of these were because I refused to live in the moment. I didn’t want to just go with things any longer because I couldn’t see the end point, I couldn’t see the next step, I was blinded by fear. I refused to love the girls who checked all the boxes because I always thought I would end up hurting her or letting her down. I live with them still in my life, whether they have a new boyfriend or not, because I can still love them in a different way. In my case, when you realize you have to let them go because you’re at different places in life you’ve realized that maybe you weren’t her Mr. Right Then but maybe you could be her Mr. Right Soon after you work on some things. Otherwise you’ll be on the sidelines asking yourself how you let that girl get away.