Finding "The One"

I just want to say that I do not at all think there is a "the one." I think that God knows who we're going to marry, so in that sense, there is a specific person for us, but I do not at all believe that we are meant to find one specific person who will make us happy and make love with us in a way that no one else could.

I think we could happily, successfully be with lots of different people. I think what makes someone the one for you is that they are a good, compatible match who has strong, healthy, desirable qualities and that they were the one who was there when you got ready to commit. I think we might have all, in the past, been with people who would actually have been very good, healthy, compatible matches for us, we just weren't ready at the time. Eventually though, we will find someone who we very much like and very much love, and we will be emotionally, even situationally, ready to do the very hard work of loving them for a long time.

I think people say "oh well, he just wasn't the one for you" about people we break up with, and that's a very nice and fine thing to say, but I don't think it's necessarily true. I think that person might very well have been a good "one for us," and what's more true is that we weren't ready at the time to do what it required to commit to love them well for a long time. And there is certainly no "one" who will come along and make that easy.

I don't meant to sound reductionist or unromantic, but I'm feeling more and more that the thing you do is to fine someone who you enjoy, respect, who loves God, who treats you well, who has something to teach you, who has qualities that you desire, who you're attracted to. And there can be a lot of these people! But you meet lots of them, and when you get ready, you pick one, and if those solid, healthy, compatible qualities are in place, it doesn't necessarily matter who it is that you pick. Each one of them would have had a unique set of things that would be especially wonderful and would be especially difficult. What makes or breaks "true love" is whether or not you each are ready and willing to commit long term to enjoying the good parts and working out the bad parts.

Are we ready to commit long term to staying together even when we don't want to anymore and working hard until we do want to again?

Do we love the person just because of how we feel, because if that is the case, when (not if, when) that feeling goes away for a while, the reason to be in the marriage is gone. No wonder people leave. Why would they stay?

Do we commit to someone because we're in love with them, or do we love them more because we committed and stuck to it?

I think who you are, what you are willing to put into the relationship, how long you can be patient as things go slowly on the path towards "better", how willing you are to turn a blind eye to those tempting people who make it seem like things would be so much easier if you'd just bail out and go off with them...

These things are not made possible because we found "the one", they are an outworking of character. This business is not done well because we found some mystical "One" but because we were the kind of people who could commit and contribute what marriage requires, and because we found someone who efforts are similar to and compatible with ours. It's not "the one." It's you.