The one person for you. Reality or farce?

Ding. Ding. Ding.

 

If only you would have told me this four years ago.

 

You should have joined the board sooner.

 

Reality.

Just takes a while to find each other.

The hard part is figuring out how to live your life in the meantime.

 

I believe that, course I have two failed engagements to very similar men in my wake, so I could easily be wrong.

 

The idea that there is only one person for you is laughable. Think about people who have long, happy marriages. How many people did they meet in their lives? 500? 1,000? Even if we're generous and say 5,000, that is only 5,000 people out of the however many billion people in the world. And one of them just happened to be "the one." Not buying it.

 

Was she a Girl Scout or a Jehovah's Witness?

 

I think too many people drive themselves crazy thinking about "the one" or trying to find "the one."

Be happy with yourself, be happy with your life, cultivate a group of people you like in your life ... and you will not need "the one." Chances are, that's exactly when you'll find it.

I don't buy into the idea of "the one" -- and I wake up next to mine -- only because timing plays such a dominant role in how you meet people, and timing is so much out of our control. Maybe some person is right for you, but the timing is off. They've got a significant other in the picture, or they're planning to move away in six months. So starting a relationship isn't realistic. That happens to a lot of us. ... Does that mean those people are any less meaningful to you than "the one"? Of course not. It just means that life happens, and you make the best of it anyway.

A relationship with "the one" isn't a fantasyland where everything works out perfectly. And likewise, finding "the one" isn't some great epiphany where the seas part and neon lights give you the go-ahead. ... Life doesn't happen that way.

Be happy with yourself, be happy with your life. The rest will take care of itself.

 

This thread reminds me of a passage from Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions:

"If there was a plan to anything, she was preparing for him then, preparing for this moment of sleeping beside him in the dawn light. And he had been preparing for her. If there was a plan. Impossible to believe. If Roger hadn't somehow met her. ... Accident, the only law of life. .. It all started when he reached up to the copy of Yeats' The Herne's Egg and Other Plays on the library shelf. If he had reached for another book, he wouldn't've bumped into Roger and he wouldn't have lived here and he wouldn't've met Hope and she probably would be lying in another bed now, with another man watching her, thinking, I lover, I love her. If you thought about it you stared into the shouting pit of madness."

 

I always believed in "the one": my parents were married for nearly 30 years until my father died; both grandparents married more than 50 years; both great-grandparents a half-century, too. We come from a long line of folks who stay married, ostensibly because they're in love.

So I always felt like that person was out there and that there was that one and only person, ideally. And I made myself crazy for awhile looking for her. When I met my wife -- and I do believe she's The One with capital letters -- I wasn't looking for her and she wasn't looking for me. I think that helps. There's too much pressure otherwise and it clouds your judgement.

Well, that and many many beers.

 

I guess there is "the one" in the sense that there is one person in the world who you fit with better than you ever could with anybody else. I believe that, for me, my wife is that person.

But hey, I haven't met everybody yet.

Edit: Scroll back up and read what buckweaver wrote. He nailed it.

 

I think a lot of people confuse love at first sight with lust at first sight. I've been in good relationships and not so good relationships. I think people use "the one" to help reinforce their commitment, which is a good thing. But the divorce rate suggests otherwise.