Why Love Often Fails Our Expectations
For most of my life, I believed there was one person I was meant to be with. A single figure who, from the moment our eyes met, would just know. An invisible mechanism would click into place, and from then on, the rest of our lives together would unfold naturally.
Falling in love would be easy. Commitment wouldn’t feel like a tough choice; it would be the obvious result of fate.
In my version of the story, love was solid and unwavering. It couldn’t get boring. It would resist temptation. When you found “the one,” there would be no second-guessing and no real fear of loss. The fact that you belonged together would be a given. It was a beautiful fantasy, one I picked up everywhere. I grew up on stories where love was clear-cut. In those tales, uncertainty existed only to make the ending sweeter. Movies taught me that once you found your person, the hard part was done.
The lonely character met the right one and suddenly became lighter and happier. Love didn’t just accompany life; it fixed it. And it wasn’t just movies. Every love song gives us the same promise: one day, someone will choose you, and everything will finally make sense. Underneath it all was the same belief: love is rare, unique, and unmistakable. And when it comes, you will know.
For a long time, I thought chemistry was the start of something lasting, and recognition was the same as devotion. I struggled with the idea that love could happen more than once. “If he loved someone before,” I wondered, “how could that love have ended?” “If he once looked at someone the way he now looks at me, what does that say about us? About me?” My biggest question was, “Wasn’t love supposed to be saved for ‘the one’?”
Wasn’t love supposed to be saved for ‘the one’?
I thought love had only one correct answer. Looking back, I see how naive that belief was. My soulmate fantasy required me to believe I was so unique that someone would see me and instantly know. It put an impossible weight on connections. Love wasn’t allowed to grow; it had to appear fully formed. And if it wavered, if doubt crept in, if conflict arose, it didn’t mean the relationship needed work. It simply meant they weren’t “the one.”
My belief made love something very fragile. Every argument felt like a crisis. Every moment of doubt felt like a warning. If love was fate, then questioning it became risky. And if love could end, that meant it hadn’t been real at all. Yes, my whole life I wanted a love that was clear and finite, like penguins that choose a partner and mate for life. No wandering eye. No falling out of love. No disillusionment. You’d find your person early, and that would be it. Anything less felt inadequate. But life doesn’t work that way.
What I understand now is that attraction isn’t rare. Compatibility isn’t just one thing. Chemistry can be recreated. We can feel deeply seen by more than one person over our lives. There are countless ways to build a meaningful relationship, and there isn’t a single template for partnership. Love doesn’t follow a script. It unfolds in response to circumstances, timing, and growth. Most importantly, it happens through choice. Yet, despite knowing all this, I still catch myself searching for “the one.”
I’m still waiting for the person with whom everything feels certain and effortless. The mythical click. The person who understands me without explanation, who sees the sensitivity behind my sarcasm and the fearful heart under my adventurous spirit. The person whose presence calms me and whose touch feels like home. The fantasy is stubborn. It doesn’t disappear just because I’ve outgrown it intellectually. It lingers emotionally. It appears in moments of longing, in comparisons, in the hidden hope that one day love will happen as the beautiful fairytale I’ve always imagined.
Real love rarely announces itself as certainty.
It makes me wonder if the problem isn’t my desire for deep love, but the way I was taught to see it. When you only believe in “the one,” every relationship becomes a test of fate rather than a practice of commitment. You stop asking whether you get along or if you both want and can grow together. Instead, you ask: Is this it? Is this forever? Is this the answer? But real love rarely announces itself as certainty. More often, it shows up as a possibility. It asks to be built and discovered. Attraction might happen quickly, but intimacy develops slowly. It grows through how we handle conflicts, how we make repairs, and how two people choose to stay curious rather than defensive.
Love grows in shared habits, simple rituals, and inside jokes that don’t make sense to anyone else. Love lives both in glamorous moments and in less glamorous ones. Maybe you only really get to know “the one” at the very end of your life, looking back at everything you endured together. Maybe hindsight is the only clarity we gain. Until then, we have the people we choose now and the ways we keep choosing them.
I now believe you can fall in love more than once, and each time can be real. Love doesn’t lose its value just because it didn’t last forever. Love isn’t diminished by endings. And the possibility of loss doesn’t make it less worth pursuing. For me, the idea of “the one” is no longer about perfection or permanence, but rather about safety, connection, and meaning. It’s about building something real with someone imperfect. People have flaws. Love has seasons. The key is in accepting all its different colors.
Even if “the one” does exist, we don’t just stumble upon them; we choose them. Imperfectly, repeatedly, without guarantees. We make them the one through appreciation, forgiveness, and conscious choice, day after day. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. And you probably know the rest: until death do you part.