On The Myth Of “One True Love”

There is one true love out there.

Just for you.

If you look hard, you can find him, or her.

Your “soulmate.”

That thought is romantic, beautiful, exclusive . . .

And, it is ridiculous.

In a world of almost 8 billion people, the odds of finding “the one,” if, indeed, there were only one, would be the same as winning the Powerball lottery - twelve times. In a row.

Yet, when we find someone we are attracted to and compatible with, many of us take our good fortune to its logical absurdity: “I found my one and only.”

Proving that love is, indeed, blind.

The problem with the “one and only” mythology, besides its mathematical impossibility, is that the belief puts too much pressure on a relationship when conflict and disappointment arise, as they certainly will.

But, on another level, maybe there is “one true love,” or loves, that are experienced serially over a lifetime. Anthropologist Helen Fisher identified three different romantic relationships that some experience in a single lifetime. She calls them “lust,” “passion,” and “commitment.”

“Lust,” Fisher observes, is usually our first love and easily identified by the answer to the question, “Do I want to fuck him/her right now?” These relationships are physical and usually short-lived.

Then there is “passionate” love — intense, idealistic, fraught with emotions both positive and negative, but lacking shared experiences. These are relationships we desperately want to work, to save, but which often don’t go the distance because there is an absence of common interests and beliefs, something we call compatibility.

Finally, there is a third love Fisher labels “commitment,” a love that comes out of nowhere that masks itself as friendship in which one emotionally accepts and loves another just as they are. This love sometimes makes no sense, two people with wildly different backgrounds who, for some reason neither can articulate, admire one another, and who make us see why our earlier relationships didn’t work out. The third love, says Fisher, usually follows relationships of lust and passion often experienced more than once.

Whether the “three loves” theory is right or just more romanticism, doesn’t change the numbers. There are thousands of people who could have been our first loves, second loves, and even third loves had we met them. And the ones we did meet, in a sense were “one true love,” temporally, that is, in the moment it happened.

And thinking about love, what it was and what it wasn’t, was where I found myself after being together with one woman for 30 years in a deeply passionate relationship that failed catastrophically. I found myself no longer looking for “the one,” but just “one” with whom I could feel peace, one who is kind, giving, caring, compassionate, and concerned, who accepts me as I am and is committed to share both the joys and the hardships of a life together.

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