It was great fun,
But it was just one of those things.

It was great fun, / But it was just one of those things” is a refrain from Cole Porter’s song “Just One of Those Things.” Porter wrote it for the 1935 Broadway musical Jubilee, where it functions as a wry post-mortem on a brief romance: the singer looks back on an affair that felt exhilarating in the moment but is now being filed away as an episode that couldn’t last. The lyric’s tone—sophisticated, urbane, and slightly resigned—fits Porter’s 1930s songwriting persona and the show’s high-society milieu, where love can be treated as both pleasure and passing diversion.

The couplet compresses a whole emotional arc into two balanced clauses: delight (“great fun”) followed by dismissal (“just one of those things”). Porter captures the self-protective posture of someone trying to convert disappointment into worldly wisdom. The phrase “one of those things” suggests inevitability and ordinariness—an attempt to make a personal loss feel impersonal, as if the relationship’s end were simply part of life’s pattern. The line’s charm lies in its tension: the speaker admits genuine enjoyment while simultaneously minimizing its importance, revealing both sophistication and vulnerability.