Yahoo Lifestyle 'I Married Him But He's Not The One'
"I don't believe in The One"
Journalist Lucy Foster, 33, married her husband, Jonny, in 2013.
“I have never felt like this before.” A friend, eyes molten with excitement, said this to me a few months ago in a bar, whispering conspiratorially about a new relationship that had seen him swiftly cull a long-term partner.
Now, I’m not one to pour water on a friend’s joy, but I tend to apply cynicism to such passion. Because I’ve been there. I’ve felt that heady flush and reckless abandon. I also know it’s some sort of chemical imbalance.
“Don’t you believe in The One?” he asked, clearly offended.
“No,” I said flatly. “No, I don’t.”
“Well, maybe you and I don’t have much in common then.”
He looked smug. And worryingly frosty. As facial expressions go it’s an odd combo, but I get the subtext. I’m the one who can’t appreciate the spectrum of feeling afforded only to wild romantics. I am dead to love.
In reality, though, I’m really not. Last year, aged 33, I got married. I said my vows and I meant them. I was delighted about committing to a man I adore (despite the wet towels left on the bedroom floor) and I relish the prospect of spending our lives together, building what is sure to be the most challenging and satisfying relationship of our lives. It’s just that I don’t believe there is one person out there who is perfect for me. Quite the opposite, in fact; I think there are loads of people out there who could be perfect for me. Because I am a human being. I am built to adapt.
And I can happily live alongside many people. I know this because my mother told me so when I was about 17. My mum and dad celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary in July 2013 and theirs has, by and large, been a happy relationship. But Liz and Dick they ain’t.
“I think I could have married about 10 men and had just as much success with them as I did with your dad,” my mum breezily declared one day. “But your dad and I finished university and we wanted to get married, so we just got on with it.”
Take that, romance.
Yet people baulk if I venture that my husband is not The One. They find it shocking that it wasn’t a magic force that brought us together over a bottle of red and a shared cigarette.
Frankly, it smacks of hypocrisy. We deride those who believe we sprang from Adam and Eve, yet may honestly hold out for fate to deliver the one person – in the seven billion-strong population – who will turn our life into a Disney story. A recent UK survey found that almost half of us believe we will meet our soulmate (although they clearly haven’t read the University of Virginia’s 2012 paper that found that those who believe in The One are 150 per cent more likely to divorce).
Very recently, former NASA programmer Randall Munroe tested the probability of finding The One and found that even if our soulmate is similar in age – say five years younger or older – there are still half a billion people out there in that demographic.
But most people don’t meet more than 50,000 people in their age range in their lifetime. That’s a pretty depressing one in 10,000 chance of meeting The One. There are other issues to address. If my soulmate is out there, does he live in the same country as I do? And when are we going to meet? Because I’ve made it to 33 and I’ve met a lot of people, but my favourite so far is my husband. That’s why we got married. Should I have waited for someone else? Have I made a hideous mistake? Obviously not.
Let us not forget that until recently women were passed from father to groom to unite families, forge dynasties and curb feuds, very much like a Mad Men box set is today. The concept of marrying for love is, in the grand scheme of time, a momentary heartbeat. Thankfully, we are living in that heartbeat, but as religion in the Western world has withered, our obsession with love is at fever pitch.
True love – in all its heart-thumping drama – is everywhere. The two lovers who endure terrible hardships before being united to live happily ever after are in all our favourite TV programs (Carrie and Mr Big), books (Dexter and Emma in One Day), and even music videos, ads and, of course, films. This concept of love is used to sell things to us, basically, and we fall for it every time.
It’s a wonderful diversion from our dreary lives, an X Factor kind of love that pierces your life like an arrow, turning everything golden. But what effect does this belief have when faced with the day-to-day realities of a relationship?
According to a 2012 study,* people who believe in onscreen romances were more likely to find fault with their partners. Similarly, it has been shown that there is a correlation between exposure to rom-coms and dissatisfaction with intimate relationships. Why? Because the reality can never match up to the romantic ideal.
Yet people still give up on their relationships and move on to the next and, immersed in early infatuation, claim that this time it’s the real deal. Just think about my friend Alex. After six weeks, his true love turned out to be “a bit high-maintenance”, meaning that she soon hit the cutting-room floor. If I’d married the person I thought was The One when I was young, I could be a mother of five living in some dump.
Thankfully, I didn’t. I moved on because university beckoned.
So should I have held out for that knight in shining armour who loves DIY, writes poetry and has Ryan Gosling looks? No I shouldn’t. Because my “one” is watching TV in the next room. He makes me laugh, he’s kind to my family and friends, he can hold down a job, he doesn’t do drugs, cheat or gamble, and every so often he hangs up his wet towel. It’s not Heathcliff and Cathy. It’s not Mr Rochester and Jane Eyre. It’s not even my mum and dad. But it’s solid and it’s real. And that’s enough for me.
“I married the one”
Kate Duthie likes sewing, cycling, wine and marriage. She wed her husband, Rob, in 1995.
“I believe in The One. Not because I was raised in the sloping foothills of Disneyland, am an overt notetaker during Jennifer Aniston movies, or because my parents had a perfect marriage (although they were married for 38 years and would be still if my mum hadn’t died of cancer at 60). I believe in The One because I married him.
In order to believe in The One as I do, you need to share my definition. For some people, The One is the key to solving all of life’s problems – the ticket to a perfect relationship, something I think is unrealistic. For others, it’s accompanied by a powerful lightning bolt moment, when they “just knew”. For still others, it means only falling in love once.
For me, The One is a person who brings out the best in me, who makes me feel I can achieve whatever I want no matter how big or small my dreams might be, and who is standing by to help me manage the disappointment or the joy of achievement when and if it comes.
Being with the right person doesn’t make all your dreams come true (I still buy lotto tickets like everyone else), but having someone around who knows who you are makes it OK for you to be the best version of you.
Statistics of divorce and remarriage would suggest that people often get it wrong, but that makes me wonder whether the person they married, or committed to, was ever The One. Critics of the notion of The One mistakenly believe that to find their perfect partner, they must wait patiently for them on the doorstop, shunning all other attentions until they arrive, preferably (in my case) carrying a large bag of my favourite wine gums. Not so – by all means try before you buy, search for what you want while working out what you don’t, fall in love multiple times, why don’t you?
But I believe that when you meet The One, you will know and you can stop looking. It’s a view shared by a whole lot of other people, too. A study by Rutgers University’s National Marriage Project found that 88 per cent of 20-somethings believed that their soulmate was out there, some- where. (Interestingly, the same research suggested that 87 per cent of people believed they would find The One when they were ready to get married.)
I grew up in an English country town. I had two “serious” boyfriends at high school. There was no funny business beyond lots and lots and lots and lots of snogging, punctuated with listening to love songs and finding English literature endlessly absorbing as if it was written only for us. Love letters were regularly exchanged in between passionate embraces and more snogging. It was all fabulously romantic, but even then I had a notion these feelings would pass, we would all leave school and move away, which we did – the three of us now live in Australia, New Zealand and the US.
When I moved to London for work, an old schoolfriend became my new boyfriend and we had an intense relationship, but I knew he wasn’t The One – he liked Phil Collins for one thing. We had great fun together, but he didn’t get me and I didn’t get him the way I thought The One would. A close friend I admired from afar wasn’t interested in me as anything other than someone to have a laugh with, and then I pursued a man I met at work for some time until I got him and then realised we were completely incompatible.
By now I was still in my early 20s, but I decided I was off the market. I was going to travel and started saving for my round-the-world ticket, intending to move to Australia, where I would spend a year living and working. Then – bam! – I met Rob (who is from New Zealand) at a friend’s birthday dinner. I wasn’t looking, but when we met I found him instantly addictive and irresistible, and he felt it, too. We couldn’t stop talking and laughing, our words falling over each other’s.
Pretty soon, I couldn’t imagine another person I would rather do all the things I wanted to do with – travel, cook, parent, eat wine gums. Beyond the gorgeous smile and the extraordinary foot rubs was a man who got me –and not simply when I was at my best. We didn’t just have things in common, it was more than that. We didn’t just make each other laugh – lots of my boyfriends had done that – it was something almost impossible to explain. I honestly felt joined by a sort of invisible thread that, through many downs as well as ups, has been impossible to break.
We discussed marriage within days of meeting and when we married there was not a moment of doubt in either of our minds that this was forever.
Our relationship hasn’t been all plain sailing and we don’t always agree, but – to me – that’s not what meeting The One is about. We have had disagreements that at the time we both wondered might end the relationship. And if that had happened, we both would have believed we had lost The One.
Instead, our belief in having found our other half always drew us back together, to try harder, to make it better. We have stood side by side through serious illness, pregnancy loss and success, and are now raising two children who we teach that sticking with something when it’s right is worth doing.
If you believe in The One, if you think you are with them, they must be worth fighting for. You must value the relationship above all others and work harder at keeping it going. If you believe in many people being the right one for you, why would you bother to take care of The One you have?
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