Good Woman

This song is absolutely beautiful and is one of my favourite relationship songs ever. It's amazing the complexity it conveys considering how relatively simple the lyrics are.

For me, it is about being with someone you love and who loves you back but for whatever reason, the relationship is not viable. It's simply not meant to be in this time and place and the narrator sees this and is trying to be the bigger person and right the situation, even though it breaks her heart (and his).

I think it differs from other relationship songs with the line "I will miss your heart so tender." I think Chan is talking about a very specific type of love here, one filled with tenderness and sweetness, perhaps bittersweetness, as she says that she will "love this love forever." It is something she will take with her for the rest of her life and possibly a love that changed her at the core of her person, never to be the same again. I sense no malice or needy co-dependence here in this song (compared to so many typical pop love songs). It's very pure and unadulterated in its sentiment and I suspect the lyrics came from a very deep place...made deeper by a very deep love. You're very lucky if you get to experience this kind of love even once in your lifetime, even luckier if you're able to survive its demise.

I've never really looked at it from the cheating angle. I had always assumed that it was doomed for other reasons, either for personal conflicts or circumstantial, such as a conflict of interest or something similar.

For me, I look at it through the lens of my own personal experience. I broke up with the only person I've ever loved and had to move out of the country to pursue my education and career. We loved each other dearly and still do but it was and is for the best that we not be together. He was my professor and I was his student and in the relatively small city in which we lived, it would have only been a matter of time before it had gotten out that we were together. He would have lost his job. I would have been kicked out of my university. We both would have been ostracized by our friends and family. Everything we had worked for in our personal and professional lives would have been taken away from us and I couldn't let that happen. He was too brilliant to be taken down by a scandal and I couldn't let my potential be snuffed out by the relationship's discovery by the wrong people. We parted ways romantically and we are doing better every day in our respective lives with more time to focus on other things, but it is still hard and my heart still breaks every time I speak to him. I suspect this is how it will always be and I have to learn to accept that sometimes love is not "all you need." I will always miss his "heart so tender" and yes, "I will love this love forever."

Because I want to be a good woman And I want him to be a good man, I am lying when I say I don't love him anymore.