August 5, 2005

The One. That elusive One that we imagine, dream, fantasize about. Is he/she out there? Let’s say you are one of those people that believe in love and all that. You also probably think that there is someone out there that was made for you – your soulmate. The One who (ick) completes you. I’m beginning to wonder if there is such a thing. Maybe it’s really just all about timing and not in the hands of the love gods. Scary thought, if you, like me, have been spending most of your dating life just knowing that one day “the One” will somehow walk through your door.

Recently, a friend of mine and I were talking about her current relationship. She said that she had given up on learning anything from her relationships. To say that relationships are about learning and discovering who you are is all a crock when, in reality, every relationship is new and “learning” can’t be found in another person. I found this oddly liberating. All this time, I had been celebrating my failed relationships by saying, “Well, at least I got X out of it,” when all the time it was just a way to cover the hurt of failing again. Perhaps it just makes more sense to take a relationship for what it was and accept that maybe it was a waste of time (or not), but not to belabor the point. End of story. I loved this! It was like I had finally been given permission to not expect some major epiphany with each and every heartbreak.

This is what led me to wonder about soulmates. If there is no epiphany to be had from relationships, maybe there is no such thing as a soulmate. This is to say, if there is no higher purpose beyond the relationship itself, then relationships become random, and then the idea of destiny fails as well, which is the very basis of a soulmate. Are you following me? Perhaps there are other, more powerful factors at work in a relationship - namely, timing. I thought I had met my soulmate once in what seems like eons ago. We met, we locked eyes, shared a joke and were holding hands within minutes. I don’t know what it was, but it was something at first sight. It blew me away. To this day, nothing has come close to that moment. Sounds great, right? It didn’t work out and the reason it didn’t was nothing as dramatic as you might expect. It was just timing. We just couldn’t get the timing right. It seems we were never quite ready for one another. We met and became friends because he had a long-distance girlfriend. When he and his girlfriend broke up for a bit, I was dating someone else. And, that’s essentially how it went; we were never single at the same time. The one time when the stars did align and we were both single it seemed like it could work but by this time so much time had passed that the last time we saw each other became the last time we saw each other. I know you are probably thinking, that if we were truly soulmates then we would somehow have ended up together. Maybe, but trust me, he’s as close to a soulmate on a purely soul-matching level as I’ve ever come across. And that is saying a lot.

I’ve been in love maybe twice in my life, once for sure. But, of the two men I seriously considered marrying or could marry, neither of them were these two loves. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, right? Marriage should be with your soulmate. Or maybe a relationship is more than all the bells and whistles; maybe it’s the day-to-day stuff. I always took pleasure in the day-to-day, the quiet moments, in the relationships with the men I almost married, the moments when we didn’t always say a lot to each other but manage to still hear a lot. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten past passion and have really started to relish the real. I wonder if I’ve become more cynical or just more realistic. That’s not to say I think passion is obsolete. It’s definitely necessary but maybe not in the way I had imagined. When I was younger I think I wanted the romantic, brooding anti-hero who just walked out of a Hemingway novel, while now I’d be ecstatic with someone who just knew when to rub my feet.

So maybe there is more than one “The One”. That might make more sense because we are never really the same person at all points in our lives. But frankly, it’s still this notion of “The One” that bothers me. It’s all a little limiting and is almost asking that you set yourself up for failure. I have this friend, happily married and for all intents and purposes to her soulmate. I can’t picture either with someone else so you can imagine my shock and awe when she said she didn’t believe in soulmates. “What? How can that be?” I said. “[Your husband] is the love of your life?!” He was, she said, but she also knows that there was one other person in her life that she would have considered marrying. So, what happened, I wondered. Timing, she said. It was all timing. This isn’t to say she wasn’t happy with the way life worked out. Quite the contrary, she was thrilled.