Victorian-era writer Oscar Wilde may have had it right back in the late-1800s when he wrote, “The proper basis for a marriage is mutual misunderstanding.”
One doesn’t have to search for long to find misunderstandings related to love, relationships, and marriage manifesting themselves in Facebook or Twitter status updates, personal interviews on reality shows like the Bachelor and the Bachelorette, and in passing conversations.
The most common of these misunderstandings is the dreaded declaration, “(S)he is the one.” No matter how many previous relationships have failed and no matter how long one stays with his or her so-called "soulmate," there is no such thing as the one. There are the many, the few, the better than most, but there is no such thing as “the one.”
Dan Savage, a well-known relationship and sex advice columnist, gets questions about “the one” all the time. The 45-year-old Chicago-native currently resides in Seattle with his long-term partner and their son.
He has had many relationships, and he is quick to tell those who write to him or who record messages for the podcast version of his advice column, Savage Love, that there is no such thing as “the one.” Every relationship will fail until one doesn’t, and eventually that one might fail too, or it might not.
The point is couples never know what’s going to happen until it does. The one thing that is certain is that people can make relationships work with more than one person. Certainly, one can be attracted to more than one person. Certainly, one can build a good rapport with more than one person.
While some relationships turn out better than others, it seems illogical to attribute it to some cosmic order that has predetermined with whom a person will, can, or should spend the rest of his or her life.
A 2001 Gallup survey, commissioned by the National Marriage Project in coordination with Rutgers University, found that 94-percent of never-married singles want a spouse who would be a soul mate. What’s more, 87-percent said they believe they will actually find that person.
Hopefully, none of those people meet NPR economics reporter David Kestenbaum. Although he lives in the world of economics today, in a previous life he was a Harvard-trained physicist, according to an interview he gave with Ira Glass, host of This American Life. While he was working on a PhD in high-energy particle physics, he and his mostly single, male friends employed a variation of the Drake equation to estimate the likelihood that they would find girlfriends.
They started with the population of the world, about six-and-a-half billion. Then, they included only those in the greater Boston area, about 600,000. Then, they took out the males. 300,000. Women within ten years of their ages. 100,000. College grads. 25,000. Single. 12,500. Attractive. 2500.
So that’s the base. – 2500 possible girlfriends - for Kestenbaum and his friends, who only wanted single, attractive, college-educated women in the greater Boston area within ten years of their age. And they still have a base of about 2500 people. Now imagine if one is open to dating people all over the world, or those without a college degree. That in and of itself increases the pool exponentially. No matter what a person’s preferences, the pool of people from which one can draw is significantly greater than “the one” to which many people refer.
One cannot help but wonder if many of the relationship and marriage problems that show up in statistics and on day time television shows are aware of are a symptom of a larger problem of expectations.
When one believes there is only one person for him or her, it makes everything high stakes. If a date, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or a spouse screws up in some way, it’s a sign that perhaps that person just isn’t “the one.” The psychology of “the one” then can actually help to quicken the death of relationships or suffocate them before they even start.
The truth is people can be compatible with many different people in many different ways. “The one” thing that really matters and that sometimes get lost in discussions about relationships is the choice a person makes before, during, and after meeting some one she or he cares about, how she or he responds to different thing that person does, the expectations with which one enters a relationship, and a person’s willingness to pay what Dan Savage calls “the price of admission,” the implicit cost in any relationship between two fallible human beings.
If these misunderstanding – of probability and expectations – are corrected, then more couples may find more fulfilling relationships and more people may life more fulfilling lives.
