By Stephanie K. Hopkins
“I think I might love John,” my friend says to me over kale and quinoa.
“I think you might,” I say. “But what does that mean?”
My friend is no longer with John. It was a short romance, but very real. It ended badly, and it would be easier, in some ways, for my friend to say it wasn’t love. How could it have been if they’re no longer speaking?
We live under the spell of The One. One soul mate. One person who is right for us. One person we are meant to find and settle down with for the rest of our lives.
But what if that isn’t true?
What if there are many people we could love? Things feel more complicated in a world where this is possible. If there could be more than one “right” person for us, how do we know who to keep, who to play house with, who to force Gossip Girl and Cougar Town marathons on, who to screw up children with, who to let see us in our “comfy clothes,” and who to stick with in sickness and health for the rest of our lives?
In the world of The One, we “find” The One, as if he or she is an Easter egg the universe has hidden in the grass and we need only to scrounge around the lawn in our best bonnet to find him or her. In this world, we may anxiously wonder where they are and what’s taking so long, but we are relieved of responsibility for the actual choice. There is a grand design, and our job is to listen (and follow those ambiguous rules regarding when to call and when not to call so we don’t scare The One away). We will know when we find them, and then we will stop being attracted to anybody else and can focus on getting ourselves to Ikea to buy turquoise bowls and those cute white cardboard memento boxes to tuck away our pasts.
But when life pushes up against this version of love, when those Ikea edges—held together with Elmer’s glue and a Swedish unabridged math problem— pucker and give (and they will), when we find ourselves loving more than one person, the logic of The One is no help at all. Culturally, we don’t have a sufficient way of understanding how we might love more than one person or what to do with excess love when we feel it. We might feel confused about what we thought was love—If I love this person, then does it mean I don’t really love that one? When there can be only One, it is as if there is one slot inside our hearts with limited space, like a seat on an airplane: two people can’t sit in the same seat (especially in coach).
But what if love isn’t limited like that? What if instead of one rigid slot, our hearts are like ever-expanding rooms? Or maybe like ancient cities, where the new sits visibly on the old? What if when we love someone, we love the layers of them, all their ghosts and their potential unlived lives that have become a part of them?
What does my friend gain by calling what she felt love? For her, loving John doesn’t mean she needs to be with him or should be. Acknowledging that it’s love shifted her thinking toward him. For her, it meant approaching him with compassion rather than anger or blame. It meant letting him go when he needed to go. And it meant valuing what they experienced together even if it didn’t “amount” to anything, as if love can only be measured in its final form, as if love ever has a final form.
If we believe that we can love more than one person, we give up the comfort and reassurance of a grand plan, a right answer. But in return, we get to see ourselves as agents of our own lives. We choose the one with whom we want to spend afternoons at Ikea. And hopefully they choose us. It’s scary to think there could be others besides us, that we are not necessarily someone else’s only One. But it’s no less romantic, because what is more romantic than knowing that out of multiple potential loves and lives, this person chose you?
Stephanie writes short stories, non-fiction, and young adult fiction. She recently finished a young adult novel, "Edge of Seventeen," and is working on a memoir about her adventures as an ex-professor turned bartender. You can reach her at stephaniehop@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @stephaniehop1.
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