How do you know when you have met The One? It’s a tough question to answer. The easy response is that you’ll just know. But that doesn’t help much when you’ve yet to meet that someone special. I recently responded to another blogger’s post who was opining on how hard it is in today’s society to find a potential life partner. I can relate. I was 36 years old before I met my wife. So I am in a relatively good position to be able to offer some words of advice.

We almost never find the things we’re looking for when we expend all our focused energy looking for them. My glasses seem to know how to hide from me when I’m frantically searching the house for them. The minute I stop looking and just go about normal activities, that’s when they appear. They may be in the refrigerator but if I hadn’t started cooking dinner, instead of turning seat cushions upside down, I never would have found them.

It is the same with relationships. The people we meet when we are so focused on trying to meet someone special will generally turn out to be disappointments. It’s the people we meet when we are pursuing the interests that motivate us… the interests that drive us to be our best selves… they are the ones that have the greatest possibility of being part of something deeper and more substantial.

My wife was older and divorced with two kids (10 and 13) when I met her. According to a Cosmo article she read, the odds they gave for her finding a new partner was somewhere between slim and none. She chose to ignore the magazine’s skewed insight and instead trusted in her faith. She stopped trying to meet someone and just pursued those things that enriched her spirit. Lo and behold, those same things interested me too. And so we met while pursuing joint interests, we clicked, we dated, we married. And here we are some 26 years later still enjoying life together.

My advice to that blogger was not to search for a partner. Search instead for that which fulfills your spirit. Among the people you meet when you do will be that someone special with whom you can build a shared life.

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