While watching many short vertical C-dramas recently, I've noticed a recurring theme. The main leads having white roses in their lives.

I already know what it means. For us Filipinos, it's someone whom we refer to as your TOTGA (the one that got away). This happens because you have someone in your heart but you can't be with them, either due to social status or because you just can't face them and reveal your feelings. Due to that, it's either you settle down with someone else or they go with someone else.

This term goes back to a novel by Eileen Chang, entitled, "Red Roses and White Roses," published in 1944.

The famous opening lines capture the dilemma perfectly:

Maybe every man has had two such women, at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is 'moonlight in front of my bed.' Marry a white rose and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart.

In the story, the protagonist Zhenbao (Tong Zhenbao) embodies this split. The red rose is his passionate, vibrant mistress (Jiaorui/Wang Jiaorui) whose full of life, desire, and intensity, the exciting forbidden love. The white rose is his proper, innocent wife (Meng Yanli/Yanli), pure, dutiful, socially acceptable, but ultimately mundane and taken for granted in marriage. Over time, familiarity turns passion into something ordinary or repulsive, while the unchosen one becomes an idealized, untouchable memory that lingers forever in the heart.

For a more familiar audience, this echoes the central romantic conflict in the Tony Award-winning musical “A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (2013).” The charming but scheming protagonist, Monty Navarro, is torn between two women: the glamorous, flirtatious Sibella (the thrilling, sensual "red rose" type who represents desire and excitement but remains elusive) and the kind, respectable Phoebe (the gentle, virtuous "white rose" type who offers stability and purity). Monty juggles them in a hilarious love triangle while pursuing his murderous ambitions. Many people might recognize it from viral TikTok clips, especially videos of Mr. Navarro (the character Monty) singing frantically with two doors beside him, as women knock and enter from either side in the show-stopping number "I've Decided to Marry You." It's a comedic take on being caught between passion and propriety, much like the red/white rose binary.

In modern short C-dramas, the white rose often symbolizes exactly that unreachable ideal: the gentle, pure love that represents "the one that got away" or the missed chance for true emotional fulfillment. It's not just romantic regret; it's the haunting what-if of choosing safety, status, or duty over raw feeling. The white rose appears as a visual motif (gifts, dreams, flashbacks) to evoke that lingering ache, much like how Filipinos use TOTGA to describe the bittersweet person who remains perfect in memory because reality never had the chance to tarnish them.

I agree with the author that neither of the two is your real true love in the end. Both become flawed in their own ways once claimed: the red rose fades into something ugly and forgettable through everyday life, while the white rose turns into an irritating, inescapable reminder of compromise. The protagonist ends up with neither fully satisfying him, trapped in regret, emptiness, and self-deception. True love, perhaps, isn't about choosing one rose over the other; it's about something beyond this binary trap of desire versus duty. In the novella, no one truly wins; everyone settles into quiet dissatisfaction. That's why the white rose motif in those C-dramas hits so hard, it reminds us that the "one that got away" isn't always about fate or bad timing, but often about our own choices to prioritize the safe path, leaving the heart forever marked by what's missing.