About "The One"

A girlfriend of mine recently admitted that she knows the guy she's seeing now is not "The One", i.e. He's not the one she's going to marry, the one she wants to wake up to every morning for the next 50 years, the one who'll share her life's dreams, hopes, sorrows and joys...

When the hell did we come up with the concept of "The One"? How can we think that there's only 1 person each of us is meant to be with in this lifetime? Does this mean that, before I meet "The One", the times I fell in love were moments of temporary insanity, gross exaggeration or self-delusion? I find that difficult to believe...

And how do you go about determining if someone's "The One" anyway? Is there some mental checklist the person has to fulfill before he or she qualifies? Do you wake up 1 morning with a sudden epiphany? Does a damn lightbulb suddenly go on above the other person's head to illuminate the fact? If it boils down to just being able to picture the rest of your life with him or her, then wouldn't the fact that you can only see it happening with 1 person mean that you're probably extremely difficult to get along with? :P

And what the hell does finding "The One" signify? That your relationship will be perfect? That you'll live happily ever after? Even the most idealistic moron on earth couldn't possibily think that... I know of so many people who've claimed to have found their soulmate, only to have love die on them further down the road. (If those soulmates were "The Ones", then these friends of mine are pretty much doomed to lives of loneliness, or to ones of settling for third rate relationships. All at the ripe ol' age of 20-freaking-8. Cheerful thought, eh?)

I guess I'm of the opinion that all of us have many "Ones" in our lives. I believe the few guys I was seriously involved with were the "Ones" for me at those particular points in my life. They've all led to where and what I am today. There'll come a day when I decide to settle down with someone. Not because I'll know that he's "The One", but because I've decided that I want to. No cosmic karma. No sudden epiphany. No theatrical finale.