Songfacts®:

• When you meet the love of your life, but you are both already with someone else, you have a big decision to make and maybe a script for a romantic comedy. You might have to live with just the memories of your time together, holding on to the nights you've spent with each other.
  
  Richard Marx tells us that this wasn't something that happened to him, but it did happen to someone he knew. Said Marx: "A friend of mine went through exactly that. There were parts of it that I could really relate to, but this guy just thought that he was in the right situation, but he met somebody else, and he was, 'Ohhh...' and the girl was involved with somebody already at the time, and they just never got together. They never made a go of it. I've lost touch with this guy over the years, but I remember him thinking, what if I had missed the right one. And all he had left was a brief time where they were hovering around each other and then they both ended up going back to who they were with. I don't know if they ultimately stayed together. Maybe they even got together years later. I don't know, because I lost touch with him. But that came through that, came through this guy that I knew and was going through exactly that." (Here's our full Richard Marx interview.)
• While many of his songs are based on things that happened to him, Marx doesn't like to limit his lyrics to personal experience, which means he can cover a wider variety of topics, like he did in this song. Musically, he extends his boundaries but writing without an instrument unless he is working with another writer.
• His fourth single, this was the first US #1 hit for Richard Marx, and his next two singles, "Satisfied" and "Right Here Waiting," also made the top spot.