How Am I Supposed To Know If He's The One?
Image via Coco Knudson
This weekend, I attended my best friend’s engagement party and it was a dream. I’ve known about it for months, helped her boyfriend plan and plot, and thought incessantly about all of the details leading up to the proposal. Would my flight get in on time? Would we have enough monogrammed hats for the group? Where exactly would we hang the paper lanterns?
Because this is the first engagement in our group of childhood friends, it has (of course) sparked the inevitable conversation of who’s next. The who’s next question is a complicated algorithm made up of years together + financial stability + living arrangement + compatibility + “Does he make you laugh?” + all of the other messy and qualitative aspects of a relationship that for some reason we think we can quantify.
In the days leading up to the engagement, the interrogation-style questioning became the most deafening. I know it was hardest for our single friends, but the inescapable prodding of parents, neighbors, and people we went to middle school with also hit me in a way I didn’t expect. The obvious “who’s next” question was easy enough to answer — “No, I won’t be next. We haven’t been together that long!” — but the slithering of inappropriate inquiry never stops at the obvious and eventually onlookers got to the question I dread the most.
“Do you think he’s The One?” people started prodding.
I’ve been with my boyfriend for over a year and I’m as in love with him as I’ve ever been with another human being. I’m (almost) 25 and he’s 26. But even on mornings when I wake up and I want nothing more than to be right there in bed with him, that question haunts me.
“Is he The One?”
The honest answer (and the one I rarely respond with because it makes people uncomfortable) is, “I have no idea.”
Am I supposed to know? Lately, it feels like for some reason I am. I have this engagement ring-sized pit in my stomach, this overwhelming feeling of guilt, that even after one full year together I can’t answer that question.
What I do know is that I love my boyfriend. I know he’s the one for right now. But for some reason that doesn’t feel like enough.
It is my experience that romance in the pressure cooker of your twenties comes with an expectation that, for lack of a more eloquent phrase, you better shit or get off the pot. There’s a sense that if you’re not dating someone with the intention of marrying them, then you’re wasting their time as well as your own.
Lately, I have begun to wonder if we’re still allowed to date people just because we love them, without having to think about whether we want to marry them. Is there still space, or time, to be in a serious relationship with no intention to plan for a future together? Or, in your twenties, is that selfish or gluttonous in some way?
Just as much as I’m not ready to get engaged, I’m not ready to answer The One question either. I’m not yet equipped with the wherewithal to evaluate our relationship in such magnitudes and while I know, theoretically, that I should be allowed to take my time, it feels as if my best friend’s engagement has sent us off to the races.
Even after a weekend of immense love, “who’s next” keeps ringing in my ears. I wish I could avoid it, rise above the pressure like I know I should, but I can’t. I feel as if all of a sudden there’s a timeline on my relationship — one wherein I’m expected to decide whether or not he is it for me.
As I pack up my monogrammed hat, desperate to head home and crawl into his arms, I can’t help but feel like I no longer have all of the time in the world. The clock is ticking and the pressure to make a decision is approaching far more quickly than I feel ready for.
Maybe this is just the engagement party version of Sunday Scaries and it will pass, but I’m starting to get the feeling that this is just the beginning. Wedding season is coming and, for the first time in my life, it’s the emotional hangover I’m dreading the most.