How Daydreaming About The One Suffocates Real-Life Love

‘The One’ doesn’t have to be the only one.

“I’d rather be the one you choose to come home to every night,” my husband and I agreed in the early days of our marriage.

Neither of us was particularly interested in finding The One. We wanted to find the one we’d rather be with, at the end of the day, day after day, year after year. Currently, as in 9 years and a three-year-old son later, it turns out we’ve made the right choice. He’s still the one I love and the other way around. We’re happy and working towards our goals, without wondering — is this The One?

If you’re asking what’s the secret, it’s simple. Or so I believe. We “work” because we kept our heads. We kept it real. Rather than fantasizing about finding The One, we made sure we found the one we were compatible with.

Not losing our heads in the process meant we made a conscious decision to show up every day, give our best to make our relationship work, and put the shoulder to accomplishing our life goals together. Our partnership relied on giving each other our best while accepting that we can’t give each other everything.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we refused to dream about the perfect love and chose to stay awake, enjoying real-life love, with all its imperfections. Imperfections we committed to. I’ve recently discovered there’s a scientific explanation on why we should all be approaching love life this way.

Searching for The One sets you up for failures & disappointment

Too many girls are raised to wait for Prince Charming on a white horse. Expected to kiss a lot of frogs before the right one (same Prince Charming) comes along. And not even when they grow up, and learn the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet, they can’t seem to put behind the idea that someday, some (how???) Prince Charming (again?!) will come to swipe them off their feet.

Well, hello, research shows that the more you obsess about romantic destiny, the more you’ll set your relationships for failure — “An overwhelming amount of the wrong kind of commitment can actually undermine a relationship.” (Source)

When you expect The One to be your everything (and no one in this world can really play this part other than you), you might find yourself believing that only perfection will do. Your relationships will carry the heavy label of infatuation and die shortly. What could have been a great relationship with a great-but-not-perfect (who is perfect, anyway?) partner, will end up not being before it even had a chance.

Research led by Dr. C. R. Knee, a social psychologist at the University of Houston, indicated that people who enter a relationship with rigid expectations will most likely finish it at the first sign of a problem, considering the problem a clue that their partner isn’t The One and their relationship wasn’t meant to be.

What people believe can affect their goals in seeking a partner, influence how they cope with challenges to the relationship and predict whether they will tend to remain with or leave a relatively unsatisfying partner. (Source)

Sooner or later, we all come to see the reality

Sure, thinking the best about a partner you enter into a relationship with will help you find more satisfaction in your love life. But only up to a point. At first, the allure of a partner is what sets on the chemistry.

Then, as the smoke sets off, deliberately looking into the good parts will help you weave the negative parts and allow your relationship to grow for a little longer. Nevertheless, a time will come when you’ll see things crystal clear. We all see things and people for what they are, eventually. We don’t all act the same, though.

As quoted in this paper, “the farther a relationship partner is from one’s ideal image, the less happy one will be […] How couples deal with the threatening reality that their newfound partner is not perfect is central to the success of the relationship.”

At this point, when you realize how far your partner really is from your ideal image, you could either walk away, because you clearly haven’t found The One [rolling eyes] OR take it as an opportunity to build your relationship by knowing your partner better and becoming closer [drum beat sounds].

The One doesn’t have to be the only one

Let The One turn into The One You Choose To Be With. Because you match together. You’re feeling great together. And you see yourself looking in the same direction rather than staring into each other’s eyes for ages.

Here’s an interesting article from HuffPost that takes the definition of soul mates as an opportunity to let people know that there could be hundreds of soulmates for you out there.

Believing you could have a fulfilling relationship with only one person (from the whole 7 billion people around the world) is pretty much like believing that The Earth is the only planet in the Universe where you’ll find life.

Once you accept that The One doesn’t have to be the only one, you’ll be less picky and more realistic. You might even find yourself turning from that miserable person who couldn’t find true love (sighs) into an attractive, confident, and fun to be with person (wink wink).

The change won’t go unnoticed, and you might as well become bombarded with date invitations like Harry Potter was bombarded with Hogwarts acceptance letters. Open the door to opportunities and they’ll come flying.

As relationship psychotherapist, Esther Perel likes to put it,

Relationships are like instruments. If you expect to pick one up and quickly play it like a pro, you’re going to become frustrated and disgruntled, and you may just walk away from a good thing — missing out before you really even began.

If you don’t like the sound of your relationship, it’s not because you haven’t picked the right instrument. It’s because you haven’t come to master it yet. Stop searching for the perfect instrument. Pick an instrument you love and work on it every day.

Accept that you may not work on it for the rest of your life, but embrace the journey for now. When you’ll want to get the ropes of a new instrument, make sure it’s because you’ve had enough of the old one, not because it wasn’t meant to be.

Thank you for making it to the end! I’ve got more stories like this one if you want to peek: