When I first got my Katy Perry "Teenage Dream" CD, I was so excited and fell absolutely in love with all of her songs, including "California Gurls" and "The One That Got Away." Of course, I was 13 when she released that album in 2010 -- much too young to know what she was feeling when she was writing these songs, or for any of the songs to provoke familiar feelings in myself. Now that I’m 20, a lot of her songs finally reflect on something similar in my life; I realize now that her song "The One That Got Away" is more relatable than my 13-year-old self had thought.

Urban Dictionary says that “the one that got away” is a previous significant other that in present time still would be an ideal partner, if it weren’t for some force or fate beyond your control keeping the two of you apart.

Most times, a significant other will be someone you were in a serious committed relationship with, but a significant other can be a lot of other things besides a partner. Maybe your significant other was a friend that you knew it would never work out with. Maybe it was someone who had a big impact on your life, but you didn’t get to know them all that much before they walked out of your life. Maybe it was someone you always secretly liked but never got the chance because you never worked up enough courage to talk to them or ask them out. The possibilities are endless.

Ending a relationship for reasons you can’t control is probably one of the worst ways to lose someone. Unfortunately, it will happen to most of us at one point in our lifetimes. In many cases, we won’t even realize that someone is a “one that got away” until much later. In many of us, we will find that there are multiple cases of “ones that got away.” I recently realized that an old friend (or maybe more than friend) of mine was one of those and I haven’t talked to him in six years.

The thing about looking back and regretting things in our life is that we shouldn’t be doing it. While it’s OK to look back and reminisce, regret usually just adds unnecessary negativity to our lives. But we’re human and we can’t help it. We need to understand, though, that everything happens for a reason. If we were really meant to be with that person, then it will work out. If we really weren’t meant to be with that person, then it simply won’t. We move forward with our lives and trust that everything that is meant to happen will happen, and if we really want something to happen, then we work for it. But when nothing we do is enough to bring our dreams to reality, we accept that there is something other than that in our fate.