Forget ‘The One.’ Look for One of the Ones instead.

I’ve never believed in “The One.” This term for the person you might choose to spend most of your life with has always seemed creepy, almost god-like and incredibly unrealistic.
My problem with The One is its sense of precision, plus its implication that love is finite and unchanging. If I were looking for The One, I assume it would be impossible — like hunting for a very small needle in not one haystack but several. I know marriage success rates aren’t great (though they are improving), and that monogamy is on life-support. But if there was truly only the one match for each and every one of us, there’d be even fewer happy lifelong partnerships out there.
So rather than talk about The One — even sarcastically — I prefer One of the Ones instead. There has to be more than just one human on this Earth for each and every one of us. Otherwise we’d never stand a chance of finding him or her. And if something were to happen to that person, no more love for you? Nonsense!
Recently, I spoke with my friend Philippa Hughes on her Women of Uncertain Age podcast about this concept of The One. She’s also a skeptic; take a listen.

Hughes married the person she thought was The One when she was 23. Sixteen years later, they divorced, with about the last five of those being “tense and confusing,” as she writes in a recent blog post.
“We stayed in the marriage those extra years perhaps,” Hughes writes, “in small part, because we were operating under the misguided notion that there was only one person suited for each of us in our lives and we had found that One and therefore it was lunatic to separate.”
For her, One of the Ones felt like a healthier way to acknowledge that there can be different Ones for you as you move through life.
“The One for you in your 20s may not be The One for you in your 40s,” Hughes writes. “Splitting up when you’re no longer The One for each other gives each of you the opportunity to find The One for the next phase of your life, so you can keep growing.”
Karen Yankosky, Hughes’s partner in podcasting, has another anti-soulmate phrase that I like: “I see that person not as The One, but as the Plus One,” she wrote in a blog post this week.
“I don’t treat dating like a treasure hunt,” Yankosky writes. “Of the millions of eligible and age-appropriate straight men who occupy Earth, more than one will rate highly enough on my personal sliding scale of compatibility to make a good partner. I don’t expect that person to ‘complete’ me, as if I were missing a limb, and I don’t look to him to fulfill my every relationship need.”