How to Know You Have Found ‘The One’
Surprisingly enough, Hollywood got it wrong.
For most of my life, this idea of ‘the one’ gave me an itch. There are billions and billions of people on Earth and all these rom-coms are really trying to convince me that ‘the right person’ for me has actually been in my hometown all along? Sounds dodgy.
I rejected the concept and wanted nothing to do with this idealisation of someone above everyone else. At the same time, every single person I met and eventually dated — even for the shortest while — would be unknowingly compared to a romantic golem of a human being I’d created in my mind — the so-called one.
This isn’t something I was entirely aware of, mind you. In fact, for the first handful of people that ended up going different ways from mine, I didn’t even know what had actually happened. All I knew is that, somehow, they always seemed to fall short.
I would have this feeling of an unmet expectation in the most bizarre situations: once, while at coffee with a soon-to-be disastrous date, I was asked, “Have you ever known love?” (quick sidebar here: this was a good few years before Portrait of a Lady on Fire came out so I’m not entirely sure Céline Sciamma wasn’t just eavesdropping on our conversation). My first reaction was to laugh. The second, to look away. The third instinct was to pick up my things and leave because I didn’t want this, any of this. I wanted subtlety and softness, none of this blunt business, and I was so, so disappointed.
I stayed and finished my coffee, instead. I couldn’t shake off the feeling of having been let down by something but, then again, I didn’t know what it was that I was measuring this date up against. All I know is that it ended in a strangely shaped hug and we haven’t seen each other since.
Silence Isn’t Overbearing
I still remember the first time I pointed it out. Self-conscious as we all are at the beginning of any relationship, I wasn’t sure my inner peace was shared quite to the same extent or if he’d just gone quiet because he’d realised what a horrible mistake he’d made and was now plotting the quickest escape route out of his own flat.
“Is this okay?” I asked from the other side of the bed.
He looked up from his book, a touch dazed, thoroughly confused.
“The silence,” I explained. “Is it uncomfortable for you?”
Ask anyone who’s ever met me — better, ask anyone who’s ever had the displeasure of sitting behind me at a restaurant — and they’ll tell you I really never do shut up. So, understandably, it came as quite a shock to me to find out that I could, in fact, be quiet for extended periods of time and suppress the verbal diarrhea that accompanies my every waking minute.
There’s a Serenity You Can’t Explain to Other People
In me hovered a calm that I hadn’t experienced up until then. It wasn’t that I couldn’t think of anything to say to this guy anymore, and it wasn’t that before I’d just been trying to fill the silence with random thoughts (okay, maybe sometimes but certainly not all the time). It was just that I was so comfortable in his presence that I felt I could be myself, the way I am only ever around my actual self.
Gone was the urge to impress, to make micro-adjustments to my personality as the sentences drew on and on. I was quiet, he was quiet and, suddenly, so were insecurities and inhibitions. The whole world seemed very quiet then but maybe I had just allowed my brain to shut up for once.
I tried talking to my friends about this whole not-talking business but there’s only so much one can say about silence. On top of that, you never want to seem like you’re bragging about your new-found significant other so I just let the peace wash over me and listened to the tragedies of their most recent break-up.
I Was Dying to Tell Him Everything
All the way on the other side of the silence spectrum is this giddiness you feel when you meet someone you actually want to talk to. It’s the sort of childish excitement that for a long time I didn’t think I would ever get back.
Not only did I now find myself reaching previously unheard of levels of comfort in which I could simply get lost in my own reveries for hours on end and not feel the constant entertainment pull gnawing away in my brain, I actually had someone I wanted to tell everything to — and I do not use ‘everything’ lightly.
Every event — regardless of how minor — doubled in excitement at the prospect of my later recounting it to him. If a friend of mine had a horrible date, I would listen carefully and then fantasise about all the dramatic re-enactments him and I could perform as we cleaned the bathtub. If a total stranger tripped in the supermarket queue, I would enjoy my version of it over dinner — and his laughter over it — a whole lot more than the unfortunate reality of hazardous flooring.
Even more unrestrained was my need to tell him about everything that had come before. The childhood tales, the barely noticeable knee scars from a not-so-farsighted figure skating move, the doubts, angst, misery, all the books that had stayed with me and the films whose lines I could probably quote backwards, all of these served as context.
I wanted to give him as much of me as I possibly could, everything and anything I could think of that may explain how it is that we’d found ourselves here.
You Stop Comparing
Above all else, what I found most baffling was that I am so rarely disappointed nowadays. It’s not that he always has the perfect reaction to one of my long-winded, could-have-sworn-this-was-funny stories, or that we have the cookie-cutter type of happiness we’re all sold on only to discover it doesn’t actually exist.
Our life is never perfect — most days it’s far, far from it — but it isn’t held to an unmatchable standard either. I had to let go of a lot of idealised concepts I didn’t even know I’d hoarded to make this relationship work — as I’m sure he did too.
The ‘one’ we’ve all been told to incessantly search for doesn’t live in your hometown, the next one over or on the other side of the world — it doesn’t even exist. What exists, instead, are billions and billions of people you need to make your way through until you find someone worth giving your quest up for.
My one doesn’t get each one of my hilarious quips. He doesn’t cry when Four Weddings and a Funeral plays. He’s good with a hoover but absolutely dreadful when it comes to wiping a counter.
For some reason, apparently I wouldn’t have it any other way.
