The One

(For best effect, read this with Limp Bizkit's 'The One' playing in the background)

The great lie that many people believe is the concept of a soulmate. This is the belief that there is one and only one person in the world that you can share yourself with, i.e. the person that completes you. This is probably responsible for much suffering in the love and romance department, when the soulmate turns out not to be so.

A more realistic concept to believe in is the idea of having 'The One'. That one person you can be totally infatuated, in love, sexually attracted, intellectually stimulated, everything, the works. The One. In reality, despite the terminology, there are actually many Ones. Some people are lucky enough to discover many different people throughout their life that they can identify as The One. Others are not so lucky and go through life in a sort of void state lacking in passion.

My ideal situation would be to spend my life with a person I sincerely consider as 'The One'. I suspect many people don't actually end up getting married to their The One. They end up with the first person to have a semi kinda mutual attraction with who shows up at the right moment in their lives. Nothing wrong with that. If everyone pursued The One there would be very few married couples and the world population would be severely depleted.

What is The One anyway? It's hard to explain. There is a physical attraction no doubt, a sexual chemistry, a meeting of the minds. I define it as the feeling of knowing that this other person is really, really cool and it would be neat if I could spend as much time as possible with her. But the precise definition is elusive and could be different for each person. Like what the Oracle said to Neo in The Matrix, "Being the One is like being in love, you just know it, balls to bones." Deep inside you know in your gut when you know you have met The One, there's no denying it. You also know when a person is not The One.

Society tends to exert peer pressure on individuals to get married and raise a family. The reason being that ultimately, families are good for society as it promotes stability and child-bearing which keeps civilization and society alive. Imagine a world where people didn't have kids, we would be extinct as a race in a few generations. So people tend to want to get married and have a family at a certain age to keep the cycle of life intact. Nothing wrong with that. But there lies the conflict.

Ideally we want to be together with the person or persons we come across as being The One. Yet realistically it is a crapshoot, most of it is luck of the draw. So we are faced with a dilemma. Do we gamble, stick it out and wait for The One, or do we make do with the best that is available at a particular time. If I take a chance and wait for The One to arrive, I risk being alone and I pay the price of being choosy. Yet if the wait pays off and I do end up with The One then I gain a big piece of the ultimate joy in life.

So my question to you is, which are you willing to choose: The One or The Only One? Are you willing to gamble, possibly lose and pay the price of waiting for true happiness, or are you the type that is willing to compromise, accept that The One may never come so you take whatever is available at the right time? Are you the sort that goes for The One or The Only One?