Based on my own experience, I think things worked out for the best. Not that you two CAN'T at some point get together and live happily ever after, but a pleasant fantasy is sometimes better than reality. I dated a girl whose boyfriend had just died and in dying he effectively became a perfect ideal and no longer a person. And I couldn't live up to that because, well, dead people don't make mistakes. And I had a similar thing with a teenage love happen to me. Except my perfect memory of teenaged love now has to live in my head with the reality that people change as they get older and life has a tendency to make us more bitter than we were when we were naive to the fact that life is a cruel thing. And the best we can hope for is not to let that fact consume our perception of it (that last sentence is my feeling because I didn't want to leave it at life's a bitch and then you die). You two get to be friends and experience those benefits without the complexity of relationships possibly fucking that up forever
Well, the story continues as follows: 5 years after she got married, she decides to get a divorce. Things weren't going that well. During the divorce her husband gets diagnosed with cancer. 5 months later, he dies. His family blames her for his cancer (!!!!) and that she left him when he needed her most. Then starts probably the hardest time for her. Because she also blamed herself for leaving him. It took her the next 2-3 years to get clear about this. During that period she called me once and basically asked me if I want to marry her. For a split second, I thought about it but then pushed it away. She way mentally unstable and I couldn't even think about that working out. A year later I get mentally unstable and refuse her approaches because of that.... Now both of us are better off. Who knows what the future brings :)