Does True Love Really Exist? Waiting for The One.
- Rahat Kapur
- Sep 8, 2014
- 5 min read
We all know the story of Cinderella. Girl-next-door with an evil stepmother is granted a wish by her Fairy Godmother as she cries in the basement. With the wave of her wand, her rags turn to Ralph Lauren and her flats to Fendi and Cinderella seeks her fella. Girl dances with Prince Charming at the ball, only for her to lose her shoe and the Prince, his mind. Before you know it, the Prince is searching the kingdom far and wide for the girl with the golden foot and finally, when he finds her, he knows he’s found The One.
For most women, that story encapsulates everything that is magical and romantic about life. The whimsical tale of knowing the perfect man for you could be right around the corner and all you need is fate, a little faith and some luck to bring you together. We live in the unspoken hope that there’s a Prince Charming out there for all of us, a soul mate, the guy who we know is our one true love. I like, many of my female species, have bought into the dream many a time of waiting to find the ‘right’ guy. After all, life can get pretty lonely, especially being in a profession where you’re on the road most of the year and working twelve hour days. But amongst all this hope and faith and belief and magic sit a chain of unrequited heartbreaks, endless nights of tears and self-doubt, hours of mind games and before you know it, I suddenly find myself asking, what the hell is true love anyway and does it really even exist?
If you ask a scientist, they’ll tell you the concept of love itself is nothing more than an emotional illusion. It’s a mere chemical reaction that is driven and conceptualised by the endorphins released when we identify and project our own beliefs onto someone else and consequently a flood of dopamine flows that creates the notion of addiction. For those of you like me who don’t know what that means, basically they’re saying love is really just a chemical reaction that’s as bad as being strung out on drugs because even though you know it might hurt later on, you keep coming back for more. Your brain is essentially using your body to actively make a fool out of you, and is then justifying your stupidity through citing it as natural chemistry and neurobiology. Sounds fair, doesn’t it. Now trying explaining that to the average woman who believes love and finding the man of her dreams was the true karmic purpose of her birth because ever since she’s been five years old, her mother told her Prince Charming was coming to get her. See the problem?
As I spoke at a relationship and dating forum this evening, I tried to explain to my audience of young, beautiful and very professional women, that their fanciful ideals of love needed to be realigned with reality. The consumerist fantasy bubble of finding their dream man or Mr. Right needed to be popped because nowadays, love isn’t so much about finding The One as it is about finding anyone. Needless to say, this did not go down too well.
‘Well, if you’re saying there’s no ‘The One’, then what are we all waiting for? Why don’t we just date the next guy who comes along?’ A well-dressed twenty-something woman in a designer suit stuck her manicured hand up and retorted as soon as I finished my sentence. That right there was the problem. As women, have we really reached a stage in life where if we’re not finding ‘true love’, we’re not finding love at all?
In a world where the desire for monogamy is becoming as rare as the number of people who know the difference between ‘you’re’ and ‘your’, what is the point of finding The One? And who’s to say once you’ve found The One, they’ll be the right person for the rest of your life? What if you were married to The One and things fell apart? What if The One suddenly started to become abusive ten years into your relationship? What if The One dies? Does it mean we give up on the concept of love, whatever it may be, a scientific explanation or some divine intervention? If I could recount the hundreds of stories of heartbreak I’ve heard over the last twenty-three years from so many of my closest female friends about love lost, they almost always thought the guy was the perfect man. But when it all falls apart, the only justification they can muster to give themselves the hope of moving forward is, no he wasn’t Mr. Right or else he wouldn’t have broken their heart. So where does that leave them? Lonely and miserable with a false hope and underlying desperation that the next one, the next guy who comes along, he’ll surely put it all back together again. He’ll surely be The One.
Open any women’s magazine nowadays and you’re bombarded with images of perfect celebrity couples leading their perfect celebrity lives with their perfect celebrity bodies. Flip to the back pages and you’ll find a step-by-step instructional guide on how to emulate the perfection strewn across the front pages. There are endless tips you on how you can make your relationship as fertile and enlightening as Brad and Angelina’s. Flip to any TV show aimed at a demographic of women aged between twenty and thirty-something and you’ll find the exact same thing. A protagonist who in her own right is independent, smart, funny, brilliant and yet, she’s almost always enduring the experience of dating all the ‘wrong’ men before she finally meets The One and a season finale kiss under Eiffel Tower ensues. This is what we’re all waiting for and when we don’t get it exactly this way, we think it’s all a bit too hard and walk away. Some of the most renowned and celebrated love stories in the world are ridden and plagued with tragedy, adversity and pain and yet today, we feel as though when a light breeze will whip our hair and tingle along our backs as we meet the right guy, we’ll know it’s love.
As a romantic, I’d rather talk about feelings than facts any day of the week. Life should be lived and felt and experienced, not calculated and thought through. I take risks and wear my heart on my sleeve, but even I can’t justify The One. If you walk through life with your eyes closed hoping the first pole you bang into will be the one that teaches you how to avoid them all, all you’ll end up with is a sore head and a broken nose.
To the woman who asked me what the point is if true love doesn’t exist and we can’t find Mr. Right, maybe you’re approaching it wrong. If you waste your life waiting for your Balmain to match his Boss, you’ll never see the potential of the Burberry right behind you.
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