It’s a nice thought. We imagine rolling through Harris Teeter with a rickety shopping cart, absentmindedly twirling our hair and humming “The Great Escape." Suddenly, we reach for the same jar of low sodium spaghetti sauce as Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome. Our eyes meet, we fall in love, we get married, have 2.5 even taller, darker, and more handsome children, and live out the rest of our days on a white picket fenced farm until one of use dies tragically of some sort of terminal illness. But don’t worry, the other will live on because love can survive. All starting from spaghetti sauce and all occurring over an impossibly brief timeline.
An interesting concept that exists in our society is the idea of finding “the one." “The one” is a fantastical idea that is coveted by nearly everybody in our world. It originated from literature, romantic comedies, and TV shows, leaving us all under the impression that there exists out there only one person who completes us.
Romantically speaking, finding “the one” is a rather daunting task. We face billions of people, and we face them alone. We are expected to isolate a single person from the masses. Not only that, but this person is expected to be the only person who is perfectly compatible with us in every way. Sounds impossible, right? Right.
Some people devise different theories about this concept. One philosopher once stated that man was created as having four arms, four legs, and two heads. We were all split in two by a second, more envious god, and as a result we are to spend the majority of our lives desperately searching for our other halves. While a romantic sounding idea, this has the implication that we are incomplete people, and that in order to find peace we need another person.
Another theory is the general idea that there are actually multiple individuals out there who will be able to satisfy our need for a soul mate. Those who have a flair for the romantic and dramatic tend to turn their noses up at this thought because, well, love is a battlefield. Admitting to the fact that there is more than one person out there for us is to lazily opt out of that fight. Personally, I find this idea much more pleasant than the one that dictates that I will continue to strike out in love until I find the one person who I am meant to be with (and by the way I have no control over when, how, and where I meet this person because fate is supposed to bring us together). So the question I myself, you, and so many other weary souls are asking, is how the hell are we supposed to quiet the noise, and find that perfect love peacefully?
One thing is for sure, and that is that fate is fate. Regardless of what divine being you believe in, if any at all, we all have some sort of basic idea of destiny. The idea that no matter how much we try to manipulate our own lives, some things are just meant to happen. Whether this manifests itself in the form of chance encounters, coincidences, “signs from ________," or things that are just plain weird, we get little signals that we have a lot less control over what happens to us than we tend to think.
The question that arises then is, can we really control who we fall in love with? It has occurred to all of us at least once, the terrifying idea that “the one” for us is halfway across the world serving with the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, or scheduled to leave the state, or already is with someone else. This provides us with some reason to believe that the concept we have had forced down our throats since an early age, the concept that gives us all anxiety, the concept that even in our “hookup culture” is in the back of everybody’s mind, the concept of finding “the one” is really unrealistic.
My advice to you would be to breathe. It would be to have patience. Not just with the universe, not just with the stars, and not even with “the one,” but to have patience with yourself. To find peace in knowing that when you are truly ready and your heart is truly open, you will find somebody who loves low sodium spaghetti sauce just as much as you. In the meantime, there is no reason to deprive yourself of happiness waiting for a chance encounter. Meet new people, fall in love, have your heart broken, break hearts, and know that if there truly is “one” person out there for you, they will find in their own time you regardless of what you do to speed up the process. No sense wasting worry on what is out of your control.
