Myth of romantic love

For the past few months, I’ve been hearing the concept of “the one” from a number of people. Not that I don’t believe in destiny or fate (that would be too much) but the idea itself hasn’t existed in my thoughts for the longest time. When I was still a little girl, I believed that there is someone for somebody. But when I began to love somebody in a romantic way, my thoughts changed. It may sound odd because why would my belief change just when I learned how to love.

I see single people, I see people with broken hearts and hoping that “the one” would arrive soon to heal their loneliness and pain, and I see people who severely waits for the one meant for them. And some of them grew old waiting. Witnessing these cases, I realized that not everybody has “the one”.

The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck was right when he said that those ideas about romantic love is all just a myth. It’s a pure fallacy to say that there is one man meant for a woman and vice versa. Innumerable number of single people futilely struggle to adapt their existence with the falsity of the myth. Some couples hang on to the relationship despite all their conflicts and complains because they were thinking that they have to stay because their partners are the one meant for them. These couples forget that the concept of “the one” shouldn’t be used to accept every problem in the relationship. Instead, they should learn to make things work by fixing the core of the conflict. If the relationship doesn’t work, then it’s something that is just really not meant to happen. It’s not good to say that it is a horrible mistake. But to quote what Mr. Scott M. Peck said,  

“Perhaps it (myth of romantic love) is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage”

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title taken from Dr. M. Scott Peck's book entitled "A Road Less Traveled"
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