"I came here to tell you I still love you."
What if "the one" isn't the one
you're supposed to be with?
Friends poses this question through Monica's romance
with Richard Burke, the dapper opthamologist
who also happens to be her parents' best friend.
"I mean, I'm dating a man whose pool I once peed in."
In the context of the era when Friends aired,
Richard appears as the perfect guy,
equally admired in the eyes of women
"It's James Bond."
and men.
"Your boyfriend is so cool."
"Really?"
"Yeah, he let us drive his Jaguar.
Joey for 12 blocks.
Me for 15."
After a series of unexceptional men
who haven't made a lasting impression on Monica,
Richard opens up her world to a completely new level
of love and passion.
"You know I love you too, right?"
[Sighs] "Now I do."
Yet he's a temporary visitor.
Richard is "the one that got away," that most exalted ex
who changes your life forever
and holds a special station in your heart,
but who's not right for you in the long run.
"Nothing's changed here.
He still doesn't want children, and I still do!"
This character represents
the path that may seem better than what we actually get.
"You need to be with someone more mature.
Maybe someone with… a license to practice medicine!"
But that ultimately isn't preferable to real life.
Here's our take on Richard
and the enduring power of the one-that-got-away trope onscreen.
"Getting over you was the hardest thing that I've ever had to do.
And I never let myself think about you."
"Wow."
"You're watching..."
"The Take."
"Thanks for watching, and be sure to share and subscribe."
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"He happens to be one of the brightest, most sophisticated, sexiest men
I've ever been with!"
Part of why Richard looms so large
is that he's made out to be the ideal man.
First of all he's played by 80s icon Tom Selleck,
who became a sex symbol as the star of crime drama series Magnum PI,
"He was really sexy.
Women all across the world were madly in love with him."
and who established his lovable-cool reputation in popular movies
like Three Men and A Baby.
"I'm an architect for Christ's sake,
I build 50 story skyscrapers, I assemble cities of the future,
I can certainly put together a goddamn diaper!"
So when Friends aired,
the character of Richard channeled Selleck's real-life charisma,
and this is cemented within the show
by almost everyone in the Friends' fictional world being in awe of Richard.
"How come Richard looks cooler with one of these than me?"
"Dr. Burke is sexy?"
"Oh God, absolutely!"
And to top it off, the writing underlines that
-- far from being superficial or full of himself --
this successful doctor is also a deeply kind person.
"What were you doing in Africa?"
"Working with blind kids."
"Ugh, what are you doing to me?!"
Moreover, Richard's relationship with Monica
possesses all the ingredients of a great romance.
They have a backstory, but they meet again after many years
when one is unrecognizably transformed.
"Is Monica Geller coming?
I was told she was."
"Dr. Burke, it's me."
"Monica?"
And only one episode after their meeting,
their smitten feelings are already blooming into love.
"He told Johnny that he thinks he's falling in love with her."
"Really?"
"I tell you, I've never seen him this happy!"
The lovers face significant obstacles --
chiefly, the stigma of their May-December romance
and the disapproval of Monica's parents --
which push them to loudly proclaim their commitment to each other.
[Screaming] "For your information, I am CRAZY about this man!"
The revelation that Monica is only the second woman Richard has slept with
"I've only slept with women I've been in love with."
also confirms that this relationship is unique and special,
not the clichéd cheap dalliance the world assumes it to be.
"I hear he's got some 20-year-old twinkie in the city."
[Spray noises] [Screech]
This cigar-smoking, old-school gentleman is clearly a major step up
from the childish, unremarkable guys Monica has dated up to this point,
"You still work at the Multiplex?"
[Laughs] "Like I'd give up that job!
Free popcorn and candy anytime I want?"
making her realize she deserves to be with a true catch
who's crazy about her.
On a deeper level, Monica's romantic fixation
on a man so closely associated with her parents
may also have an underlying psychological significance.
It's a running joke that her parents are hyper-critical of her
and openly favor her brother Ross.
"We're turning your room into a gym."
[Audience laughs]
"Wow, that is a surprise!
Just one question.
Why not Ross's room?"
So hooking up with Richard could be a way of seeking the validation
and love she's lacked from someone who is essentially a stand-in for them.
But when she defends her relationship in spite of her parent's disapproval,
"This is the best relationship I've been in--"
"Oh, please!
A relationship?"
"Yes, a relationship!"
Monica uncharacteristically defies
the mother and father she's usually falling all over herself to please --
and this act of courage represents a key moment of maturity.
Besides being Monica's dream guy,
Richard is also the man other men want to be.
"What about that thing he did
when he tipped the guy who showed us to our seats?
You never even saw the money.
It was like this: 'Hey, Chandler, thanks for showing us to our seats."
[Laughs]
Chandler's initial worship of this man when Monica and Richard are together
explains why, after coupling up with Monica himself years later,
he's extremely threatened by the memory of her ex.
"That's all I ever hear.
'Richard, Richard, Richard.'"
"Since we've been going out, I think I've mentioned his name twice."
"Okay, so 'Richard, Richard.'"
While Chandler's manhood is frequently the subject of scornful jokes,
"If you say he's straight, I'll believe you."
Richard is a paragon of masculinity.
"It'd just be another saucy anecdote
for him to share at his men's club over brandy and mustaches."
[Audience laughs]
"Is all of this about you not being able to grow a mustache?"
And while Chandler can be painfully self-conscious and awkward,
"I'm Chandler, I make jokes when I'm uncomfortable."
Richard is the picture of confidence and charm.
"As a poet once said,
'In the sweetness of friendship,
let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures…
for in the dew of little things, the heart finds its morning
and is refreshed."
"What?"
All in all, Richard seems to embody an objectively "better" life path
that Monica arguably should have taken.
"Now, this is a grownup's apartment.
I should be with a grownup, do you know what I mean?!"
This is an idea that's been explored in other stories
that set up the heroine to choose
between a polished, perfect guy and his seemingly less impressive counterpart.
"I don't get it.
Miranda could've had Blair Underwood, but she settled for Steve?"
"Oh, but you do get it, sir."
But it should tip us off that the heroines of these stories
tend to choose the guy who the world sees as less worthy --
because what looks right on paper doesn't always make sense for you.
[Shouting] "Would you stop thinking about what everyone wants?!"
Stop thinking about what I want, what he wants, what your parents want.
What do you want?"
Monica and Richard embody an all too relatable relationship pitfall:
It's possible for no one to do anything wrong,
and for a couple's love to remain as strong as ever,
"I love you."
"Me too."
but for their chance at happiness to be tragically wrecked
by timing or conflicting dreams.
"We still want different things
and we know how this is going to end."
The true source of this couple's incompatibility is their age difference,
so you could say their timing is off by quite a number of years.
"I mean, hell, I'm a whole person who can drink older than you."
When they start dating, Monica is in her twenties
and just starting to figure out her life,
while Richard is a settled grandfather.
The milestones Monica looks forward to down the road
are already in his rearview mirror.
"I love children.
I HAVE children."
Even though Richard may initially seem to fit seamlessly into the friend group,
he'll never quite feel like a peer to Monica and her intimate circle.
"He is so much cooler than our dads."
More importantly, though, Monica and Richard discover
they have very different visions of the future.
"Do you see a little... bassinet in the corner?"
"Like a hound?"
The couple's strong love for each other comes through
in the way each tries to put their own wishes aside.
"Maybe I don't need to have children."
"If kids is what it takes to be with you, then kids it is."
But in the end, this kind of extreme compromise isn't fair to either of them.
"I want to have a baby.
[Long pause]
But I don't want to have one with someone
who doesn't really want to have one."
In season six, when Monica has since moved on with Chandler,
Richard reappears and suddenly is willing to offer her everything she wanted.
"I want to spend my life with you.
I want to marry you...
I want to have kids with you."
The irony is that at this point Monica and Chandler almost break up
for the same reason she and Richard split:
thanks to Chandler's elaborate ruse to mask his intention to propose,
Monica believes she and her partner want different things.
"Are you honestly telling me that-that you may NEVER want to get married?"
"Well, never say never, but you know, probably… yeah, never."
"Then- then what are we even doing?!"
So during this moment of disconnect,
Monica is briefly drawn back to the man who expresses
that he is ready for a mature, serious commitment.
"I need to be with someone who wants the same things that I do!"
All this underscores the supreme importance of timing.
[Screaming] "Fair would've been you wanting to marry me then!
Or fair would have been Chandler wanting to marry me now!"
Like the best One-Who-Got-Away stories, Richard's regrets warn us
that you might not get another shot with the love of your life,
so you have to take your opportunity when it comes.
[Screaming] "You had your chance with her!
You had your chance, and you blew it!
And this is my chance and I won't blow it…
because we are MEANT for each other!"
On closer inspection,
the episode of Monica turning down post-change-of-heart Richard
also illustrates how much Monica's perspective has been shaped
by her initial break-up with him.
In season eight, when Phoebe believes she's found Monica's soulmate,
"I swear to God, he is her other half."
Chandler is alarmed to see that Monica and Don's preferences and interests
do seem almost ideally in sync.
"But God, a house made of cheese, wouldn't that be incredible?!"
"I'd move in tomorrow!"
But unlike Rachel,
"I believe that there is one perfect person out there for everyone."
Monica isn't swept up in the romance of finding your soulmate.
"I don't believe in soul mates, either.
I don't think that you and I were destined to end up together."
And this grounded, realistic outlook on love
no doubt has been partially formed
by the fact that she already didn't end up with the perfect guy.
Monica chooses Chandler over Richard
because they have built something rich and real together.
And ultimately, in Monica's view,
a successful partnership is defined by the choice to commit
and do whatever it takes to make it work.
"I think that we fell in love and we work hard at our relationship.
Some days we work really hard."
The Monica-Richard relationship falls into a larger canon
of "one that got away" stories onscreen.
"But what about us?"
"We'll always have Paris."
Yet the key takeaways of this narrative can differ drastically.
If we look closer, we can distinguish three main categories…
First, The Stepping Stone.
Through this lens, the one that got away is a formative rite of passage
that makes you evolve and grow as a person,
and often leads you to a new, better love.
"Maybe it's good we got hurt like that, you know?"
Monica herself embodies this outlook.
Yes, she's completely gutted after her breakup with Richard.
"Has she slept at all?"
"No."
"No, it's been three nights in a row."
"Yeah.
She finally stopped crying yesterday,
but then she found one of Richard's cigar butts out on the terrace…"
She can't resist giving their relationship another try,
and later even briefly dates Richard's son Timothy,
which is really just a subconscious way of trying to feel close to her ex again.
"Oh my God, it didn't remind you of my --"
"Don't say it!"
"No, but it did, didn't it?"
[Screaming] "YEAH!"
"OH, MAN!"
But in due time, Monica fully moves on.
"I mean, my feelings for Richard are certainly gone."
Nonetheless, having experienced this defining love
helps her understand what she needs from a forever partnership.
"I know he's the love of your life."
"Not anymore!"
Her healthy loving relationship with Richard
gave her a strong sense of self-worth, which makes her equipped
to "teach" Chandler how to be in a secure, adult partnership.
"If you give up every time you have a fight with someone,
you'd never be with anyone longer than… ohhhh!"
Second, The Tragic Loss.
This take on the one that got away
frames it as a haunting missed opportunity
to be bitterly regretted and perhaps never fully recovered from.
"But, uh, by the time I figured this all out,
it's too late, man.
She moved on.
All I had to show for it was some foolish pride
which then gave way to regret.
So I've spent every day since then chasing Amy."
In Mad Men's final season,
the show implies that Don Draper has spent years repressing his longing
for his lost love Rachel Menken.
"Maybe you dreamt about her all the time."
"Maybe."
It's notable that, while the relationship with Richard is category 1 for Monica,
in Richard's point of view, their love affair falls into category two.
"Letting you go was the stupidest thing I ever did!"
When she mentions having lunch with him in season five,
it's clear that she's completely over him,
"The strange part was he was really nice
and he looks great, but I didn't feel anything at all!"
but we discover later that this casual encounter left him reeling.
"After we had lunch last year,
I spent six months in Africa trying to get you out of my head!"
She is that looming ghost who haunts his memories.
"I'll have a scotch on the--" "Rocks with a twist?
I remember."
And this illustrates the unsettling truth
that, within a single relationship, it's possible (and common)
for two people to have wildly different takes on the lingering significance
of their bond.
"You were the one."
"You weren't."
Finally, there's type three, The Fantasy Fulfilled.
These stories offer the irresistible wish fulfillment
of getting a second chance with the one that got away.
"It wasn't over.
It still isn't over."
Before Sunset shows Jesse and Celine reuniting
nine years after their first encounter
and saving each other from continuing along their unsatisfying life paths --
"You think you're the one dying inside?
My life is 24/7 bad!"
a point underlined by the Nina Simone song that plays in the final scene,
"Just in Time."
"Baby, you are gonna miss that plane."
"I know."
In Avengers: Endgame, Marvel's Captain America also gets a happy ending
with his love Peggy after initially being cheated out of it.
"I had a date."
And Friends' own Ross and Rachel manifest this dream for the viewer too.
"I got off the plane!"
[Audience claps and screams]
A subversion of category three is the story where a character
reunites with an old love interest and is totally disillusioned,
realizing that what seemed so romantic in their head falls flat in reality.
"Kids, it took me ten years, but I finally kissed her.
And it was… terrible."
This reveals that often, the allure of this figure
who's always out of our grasp isn't really about them at all --
it's about us trying to prove something to ourselves,
"He talked a lot about the past… as if he wanted to recover something.
Some vision of himself that he had put into loving Daisy."
or to recapture who we were when we knew them.
"He knew me when I was at my best."
The Age of Innocence initially frames the doomed affair
between Newland Archer and Countess Olenska
as a category two, the tragic missed opportunity --
but Newland goes on to build a genuinely happy family life.
"He was a dutiful and loving father, and a faithful husband."
And in his later life, after his wife dies
and he has a chance to reunite with the Countess,
he's too attached to the long-cherished idea
of his lost love to see it replaced by cold hard reality,
"I think I'll just sit for a while."
"Do you mean you won't come?"
which underlines that so often we're really hooked
on some mental conception of the one-who-got away,
not the flesh-and-blood person.
"Whenever he thought of Ellen Olenska,
it had been abstractly, serenely, like an imaginary loved one
in a book or picture."
So ultimately, "the fantasy fulfilled" category is usually just that --
a fantasy to be enjoyed onscreen but rarely experienced.
"We would have lasted a week."
"No, we wouldn't have."
"We would have.
It's romantic because it didn't happen.
If it had happened, it would have just been life."
The last we hear of Richard, he's doing just fine.
"So how come Richard's selling the place?
Went bankrupt?
Medical malpractice?"
"He's buying a much bigger place.
It's got a great view of Central Park--"
"Now, that's enough out of you."
The show even hints that he's no longer so hung up on Monica,
as he's erased their sex tape to record himself with another woman.
"It's just so insulting!
Spring for a new blank tape, doctor!"
As almost all of us know from mourning our own ones-who-got-away,
life eventually must go on.
While we might occasionally entertain the bittersweet dream
of what could have been,
most of us do come to find a sense of peace
with our real lives.
[Applause] "You want to stay for another?"
"No, we should go."
Take The Umbrellas of Cherbourg:
when Guy and Geneviève reunite years after their split,
the past that could have been remains painful to them both.
[Singing] "She's a lot like you.
Do you want to see her?"
But Guy isn't interested in reopening old wounds.
[Singing] "I think you can go."
And the movie ends with him joyfully playing in the snow
with his wife and son.
Friends' own Phoebe also gets a second chance with her one who got away, David,
but by this point she's really into someone else.
"I keep thinking about Mike!"
Meanwhile, stories that go in the opposite direction
and do reunite a former couple can sometimes ring false.
The entire premise of How I Met Your Mother
is based on category 1 --
the idea that the many women Ted dates are all stepping stones
on the way to the most important woman in his life:
the titular mother, Tracy.
"It was at times a long, difficult road.
But I'm glad it was long and difficult,
because if I hadn't gone through hell to get there,
the lesson might not have been as clear."
But in a last-minute twist, the series finale revealed
that Ted was actually going to end up with his one-that-got-away, Robin,
and this was now a category 3 "fantasy fulfilled" story,
or even a category 1 story where Tracy was the stepping stone, not Robin,
"You made us sit down and listen to this story about how you met Mom.
Yet Mom's hardly in the story.
This is a story about how you're totally in love with Aunt Robin."
and the disappointed audience reaction
underlined that finding your way back to an old flame after many years
can make more sense in theory than in practice.
As Cheryl Strayed writes in her Dear Sugar advice column,
"I'll never know and neither will you of the life you don't choose.
We'll only know that whatever that sister life was,
it was important and beautiful and not ours.
It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us.
There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore."
Still, while Monica may have overcome all romantic feelings for Richard,
his influence on her can't be erased.
"Give him a kind word, shake his hand and give him the money!"
"Richard used to do it, didn't he?"
"We'd be eating our soup right now."
The important people who cross through our lives
imprint a part of themselves on us.
"I feel like if we met each other as the people we are now,
things would be totally different with us."
"Yeah, but if we hadn't met each other until now,
we wouldn't be the people we are now."
Most "one that got away" relationships are truly gone for good.
But if we listen closely, we can still hear the echoes of that love
reverberating through us.
"When I said I would never leave you--" "And you never will."
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