“The One” Does Not Exist

Western culture perpetuates the great myth: That you are wandering through the world alone until you find “The One.” According to the myth, the search for “The One” will take you through bad relationships, brokenheartedness, and long periods of singleness that will all be worth it once you find “The One”. When you meet “The One”, you will experience love at first sight, and from then on you will live, more or less, happy ever after.

This myth is a total lie.

“The One” Does Not Exist

Marital therapists don’t say the way to a happy marriage is by finding “The One.” The experts say a happy relationship rests on a combination of two things: finding a compatible partner and creating a happy relationship with them.

• When you are compatible with your partner but you don’t know how to cultivate a happy relationship, disagreements ignite into irresolvable conflicts. You will feel a chronic sense of dissatisfaction.
• If you know how to cultivate a happy relationship but you are not compatible with your partner, you will remain dissatisfied no matter how excellent your communication and conflict resolution skills are. After a while, you just won’t enjoy each other’s company. You will “fall out of love.”
• If you have neither, your relationship doesn’t last very long at all.

The good news is, compatible partners are not difficult to find. The relationship counselors I’ve been reading tell me that compatible partners are all around us and that they are as easy to find as incompatible partners. You don’t have to find “The One,” just one of the many people with whom you could be happy.

Even better, the ability to create a happy relationship is a learned skill. All it takes is some money to buy books and some patience with which you can practice.

Even If They Did, Most People Wouldn’t Want Them Anyway

The myth of “The One” implies that the best kind of love is complete love for the beloved that knocks down anything else in its path. It implies that for “The One,” we would be willing to give up our careers, our families, and our religious practices. Everything the world has to offer pales in comparison to “The One.”

Here in reality, however, a romantic partner is just one part of our lives. We want happy romantic relationships, but we also want happy platonic relationships and meaningful careers and fulfilling spiritual practices. People are typically happier, within their relationship and without it, if they take time away from their partner for these pursuits. If we don’t get time for any of these other activities, we can feel stifled, even in an otherwise happy relationship.

Why Does This Myth Exist?

Despite so clearly not existing, I think our culture formed the myth of “The One” for several reasons:

The Phenomenon of Infatuation

Infatuation, unlike marriage, has always existed. For as long as there have been sexually active humans, there have been people with hormone-addled brains spending all their time with lovers and forgetting their friends exist. It is the feeling of infatuation which powers the early months and years of romantic love. The myth of “The One” is essentially a myth about a partner with whom infatuation will never end.

Westerners tend to consider the feeling of infatuation sufficient grounds on which to claim you “love” someone, but this has not always been the case. In some places and times, infatuation was considered nothing more than a kind of mental affliction, a temporary sickness that overtook the minds of lovers and interfered with their otherwise good judgment. The role of parents and authority figures was to keep this affliction from harming the life of the one affected.

At other times, the feeling of infatuation may have been regarded as spiritually and emotionally significant, but not considered a part of public life. Dignitaries had full lives, with spouses, children, and great estates to manage. To them, time with their beloved, however precious, was just one small part of an otherwise busy life.

In modern times, we know infatuation is the result of a chemical process in the brain in which our sexual partner is turned into the object of infatuation. Their presence becomes a drug, releasing hormones like dopamine and oxytocin and causing feelings of “love,” feelings of which we cannot get enough.

Given how pleasurable the feeling of infatuation is, and how its end cleverly disguises itself as disappointment with a partner who didn’t measure up, it’s not surprising to me that we created a myth about the infatuation that lasts forever. But no infatuation can.

The Idea Of The Soulmate

The myth of “The One” is often especially attractive to people who believe forming a sexual or romantic commitment with someone forges an unbreakable spiritual bond. If you can form a spiritual bond with someone in this way, it’s not a far cry to believe the right person with whom you should form this bond has been predestined, either by a conscious God or by the unknowable ways of the universe.

Unfortunately, regardless of your spiritual belief system, this theory doesn’t hold up. Widows who were previously happily married often go on to have happy second marriages, which would not be possible if it was only possible for us to be happy with “The One.” Some people are happy despite never partnering up in their life, or despite only having a series of shorter relationships, which wouldn’t be possible if we needed “The One” to be truly happy either.

Common Misconceptions About Sexual Pleasure

Young people have sex spontaneously. They either decide to have sex right then and there, or they text their sexual partner at unpredictable times to make arrangements. Older people, however, typically realize this isn’t sustainable. When full-time careers and children enter the picture, it’s difficult to spontaneously find time for sex with any regularity.

So, they schedule. They specifically make time for date nights and they schedule out opportunities to have sex well ahead of time. This ensures that their romantic relationship remains a major part of their lives.

Other parts of their sexual lives are less spontaneous, too. Instead of whipping out a new toy in the bedroom to surprise their lover, they have serious conversations ahead of time. They verbally explore new ideas, inside and outside the bedroom.

According to the myth of “The One,” the fact that you have to schedule sex is a sign of something wrong. With “The One,” you would never have to schedule sex. You would be so filled with passion that it would be hard to get you two out of the bedroom. And of course, sex with “The One” would always be fantastic.

In reality, though, the couples who schedule sex and make time for serious conversations about sex experience more sexual satisfaction. People expect the quality of their sex lives to go down as they age and enter long-term partnerships, but the couples who do what it takes to continue having sex report higher and higher levels of sexual satisfaction.

It Allows Us To Feel Like The Victim

Love can be rough. Really, really rough. The myth of “The One” gives us something to hold on to; the myth of “The One” is an assurance that no matter how miserable your dating experiences are, you will eventually meet someone for whom all the pain was worth it, and that all you have to do is just keep trying your best.

In reality, though, most of what makes us miserable about love isn’t the love itself. What makes us miserable is our willfully passing over of the right people in favor of the wrong ones, managing those substandard relationships poorly, and then only haphazardly learning from our mistakes (or not learning from them at all) before trying again.

The key to getting a happy relationship isn’t to keep bumbling along, waiting for something good to happen to you. The key to getting a happy relationship is to learn the skills it takes to identify a compatible partner and create a happy relationship with them. You can let life beat those lessons into you, or you can go out and try to proactively learn them. One way works a lot better than the other.

I’m no marital therapist. I’m only just beginning to learn about what makes relationships tick. But it is becoming increasingly clear to me that there is no such thing as “The One” — and if there was, they certainly wouldn’t look like what we expect them to.

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Sources:

• Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy by Ken Page, LCSW
• Will Our Love Last?: A Couple’s Road Map by Sam R. Hamburg, Ph.D.
• Radical Acceptance: The Secret To Happy, Lasting Love by Andrea Miller
• Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love by Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel Heller, M.A.
• The Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love And Intimacy Alive In Committed Relationships by David Schnarch, Ph.D.