the one
liebe_klimt.
I've spent half my life either looking for ‘the one’, wondering if the one I'm with is ‘the one’, or deciding there's no such thing as ‘the one’. Several of my clients grapple with the same quandary. Do we settle? Do we wait to find this perfect-for-us person? Or do we look for another framework through which to see romantic relationships?
I have heard several times recently mention of the best-selling book Calling in "The One": 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life by Katherine Woodward Thomas. I didn’t know of it, so I watched a Mindvalley talk by the author. Her conclusion is that serial monogamy is the most common relationship pattern in the modern world. She also makes it clear that one person for the whole of our lives is a healthy, worthy goal. She talks about when romantic love was ‘invented’, and I remember myself, coming across a book in the university library in 1989, all about courtly love and the invention of romance in 11th century France.
We live in a society, certainly in the West, where monogamy and the idea of ‘the one’ is so pervasive that when our lives do not match up to the happy-ever-after Disney movie, we feel somehow that we are flawed, not doing it right, not good enough. In the course of my work and my life, I meet many people who have given up on the idea of the one. I meet others who embrace the complexity and insecurity of alternative relationship structures such as polyamory. One of my good friends asserts that humans are completely unsuited to monogamy and that so many decent people cheat on each other is testament to this. If we are all just looking for happiness and are fundamentally okay, then why would we all be searching for something that ends up hurting those we love? Maybe because biology says we should?
I don’t know. But I have come to believe that relationships work in cycles, just like nature. The cycle of a day and night, the cycle of a year as the sun and moon weave in their dance, the cycle of a life. In the same way, a relationship is born, freshens and peaks and then begins its slow demise until it is no more. The media and Hollywood and relationship gurus and Christianity all push us to the first half of this cycle and tell us that when we’ve reached the peak of the relationship, the yang, the high point of the sun, we have arrived. So, when the natural softening begins, we feel that we have somehow failed in our relationship and we grasp onto it to stay dancing at the climax forever.
What if we allowed the gentle onset of autumn? What if we allowed the slow movement into the winter of it and followed it placidly to its natural conclusion? What if we celebrated both the growth and the decay of our relationships just as we live through a year and we do not rail against winter? Winter is when the new seeds stir. Perhaps then we would forgive ourselves more and instead of calling it failing, we would just call it nature. Maybe there are many ‘ones,’ separate or together, as we go through our life, and no arrival at all.