"...has he stopped looking?"

This past Saturday, Jan 15th, 2011, I stopped into a Panera's on my way to work to pick up a quick breakfast. As I was getting a glass of water I overheard two men talking at the table next to the drink machine and one was saying to the other "but the question is: has he stopped looking?" The bits and pieces that I was able to catch during my brief tenure indicated that they were discussing some mutual friend's romantic relationship practices and the "health" of them. The phrase I picked out was one person's appraisal of how to tell whether those practices were "healthy" or not, i.e., if the person in question had "stopped looking," then, presumably, they were healthy and he could hope to make the relationship endure.

The touchstone of whether one continues "to look" while in a relationship is an aspect of romantic relationships that is seldom touched upon because we can "make" ourselves "stop looking," by an exercise of simple self-denial; however, such denial doesn't mean that the relationship has anything near the firm footing that it might have had were the "stopping of looking" a result of finding "the one."

The very existence of "the one" is a position that often comes under fire in discussions of romantic love; indeed, of any kind of legitimate, selfless love. The argument is usually developed along the lines of the fact that love is "no respecter" of persons and you can "learn" to love anyone. As true as this is, the conditions of marriage and close familial living, require a serious consideration of other factors.

Additionally, it doesn't take into account those cases in which individuals claim to have found "the one" for them. Such individuals who claim to have found "the one" speak of a bond that lies below, i.e., more fundamental than, the grounds we usually have for the garden variety of love that characterizes most other relationships. In a certain respect, that kind of love, viz,, the kind between people who claim they have found "the one" for them, although it acts selfless, is really self-centered owing to the fact that each sees the other as themselves, i.e., saving the other is saving him/herself. This sense of oneness with the other is universally characteristic of the love that obtains between individuals who claim they have found "the one" for them.

Another characteristic of this love is strange indeed. It is such that it seeks not to change the life of the other; that is, let's suppose that two people, already in marriage relationships, discover that they are "the ones" for each other, they would not disturb those relationships in order to effect their own "oneness." Instead, they would rest serene in the happy fulfillment of having discovered the other, offering whatever help or support they could, should the other need it, and letting their current relationships take their natural course.

Although this option is open to the "ones," their current relationships usually cannot withstand the increased light that this discovery by one partner brings into the relationship and they begin to disintegrate as a result. This disintegration is typically experienced as alienation or a lack of freedom because either the person feels as though affection has been alienated or that there are unspoken demands or expectations that the individual is unwilling to meet. This is not the result of not being loved in the sense of loving referred to above, namely, that anyone can be loved, but, rather, an awareness within the individual who is not "the one" that the founding bond is absent, since, resident within each individual is the yearning for just that very bond with "the one" for them. The awareness of this absent bond is heightened in one individual when that individual comes into the proximity of its presence in another.

In this regard, the suggestion made by the individual above is quite accurate; if someone has stopped looking, then that's a good indication that "the one" has been found; of course, this admonition is only as good as the introspective skills of the individual in question. Someone may think they have stopped looking but really have not...time will tell.

As for me...I have faith I have stopped, but, again...time will tell.