how do you know if you've met the one?

So many Reddit threads, magazine articles, books, and podcasts are dedicated to this topic. When we're looking for love or we think we're falling for someone, the one thing we want is certainty. We want to know it's safe to let our guard down. There are hundreds of lists of green flags or "signs" that we've met our one and only, but how useful are these?

And how useful are they when we don't know if we've even met ourselves yet?

I have a unique take on knowing if you've met the one, and my hope is that it will transform the way you look at love, relationships, and your future. I hope, too, that it will leave you feeling empowered to create the relationship you want.

my story

I'll tell you how I knew when I met the one:

• Being with him felt different than being with anyone I'd met before. I felt changed.

• I was never bored, never too tired to talk. He was endlessly interesting to me.

• I could be myself with him. No need to hide.

  
  

I'm describing my first love, my first serious relationship...It ended after 18 months. Gotcha!

This is very typical of the Honeymoon Phase in relationships. The novelty and excitement level are really high and this lasts for the first couple of years of a relationship. Often, we find someone we can be comfortable and safe with: maybe we share parts of ourselves we haven't shared with other romantic partners. This intimacy is wonderful and an important part of building a great relationship.

Falling in love is transformative, even if the relationship doesn't last. Being in love changes us; we can never go back to who we were before. Love is that impactful, and that's a good thing! When we experience the Honeymoon Phase, we often assume that if the relationship feels different and special at the beginning, it will keep feeling that way. But if you ask anyone who's gotten divorced and done some deep soul searching, they'll tell you: you recreate the dynamics from your childhood no matter how great the relationship is at the beginning.

So how do we avoid this trap?

my story continued

Fast forward several years and I met my now ex-husband. He was completely different from the men I had chosen before: kind, calm, generous, and accepting of my emotional life. (I had a string of abusive relationships.) This is a great first step to avoiding the trap of unconscious conditioning.

But we missed the most important step: getting out of the Triggered Phase. Our relationship got stuck there, and we never made it out. But, it morphed over time.

Here's how:

• In the beginning, there was a lot of conflict stemming from my (then) undiagnosed PTSD and depression. This is how I learned about projections, and becoming PTSD-free in 2013 was a big milestone for me and for our relationship.

• The explosive, confusing conflict stopped, but I still brought my conditioning with me: when I was upset, I was critical. He would then become defensive. This went on until eventually someone capitulated, but we never truly reconnected or understood what was happening under the surface.

• I did eventually learn to stop criticizing, but instead of continuing to bring my needs to him, I started meeting all of my own needs. I became hyper-independent and eventually, we were living completely separate lives. It got to the point where I felt so lonely when I was alone with him that I couldn't stay married.

The biggest thing missing from my former marriage was deep emotional honesty with ourselves and each other. We were so focused on managing each other and ourselves, of forcing everything to be Ok, that we avoided conflicts we needed to have.

We were so focused on avoiding one thing we feared (disconnection), that we created it anyway.

I am grateful for my former marriage and husband. It was the most healthy relationship I had been in, and it taught me a lot about myself...mainly, how much growing up I had to do. While I didn't recreate an abusive relationship this time, I did create a relationship where I met all of my own needs and felt lonely and isolated.

But I wasn't done learning, folks.

my story continued

Earlier, I asked this important question: How useful is it to spend time determining if we've met the one if we haven't even met ourselves yet?

Getting divorced is when I began to really meet myself.

Those few years were incredibly dark. I lost everything familiar to me. I was forced to adapt, to confront things about myself that I didn't want to see. (This is also the time I found the Jungian coaching model, and that was a life raft on my Night Sea Journey, aka Long Dark Night of the Soul.) I could no longer hide from myself.

And I don't just mean the things about me that are objectively ugly, like my desire to control everything. I also mean the things about me that are full of potential, but that I've suppressed in order to stay safe, small, and in harmony with those around me.

Overlooking the White Mountains.

My current partner is a dream, in too many ways for me to describe. He is all of the good things I listed about my previous partners and more. But that's not what makes me really believe he's the one. We've shared pretty dark seasons together. We've been unsure about each other, prepared to walk away.

What makes our relationship special is our shared commitment to not act of our conditioning, but to create something new between us. To not recreate old patterns, but to break the cycles we had previously been trapped in.

I'll be honest, this is exciting to me, but it's also scary. Within the guard rails of our conditioning, we can predict how it will all play out. We can keep ourselves comfortable by making what is familiar over and over again. Without those guard rails, literally anything is possible. There is no way for us to predict what we'll create, and my ego is not a fan of uncertainty!

Am I perfect at this process of creating something new? No. As I said, we've shared dark seasons together. My conditioning takes over, I fall into old patterns. But each time, I learn from it.

And really, that's how we learn anything new. We try something, it fails, we learn, we try something else. We make little tweaks, we get feedback, we take crash courses, we break everything down and then build it back up again.

how do we know?

So, how do you know if you've met the one? I think that's the wrong question. If we want extraordinary love, we have to be willing to become someone we've never met before. We have to be willing to break the cycles of our conditioning. We have to be brave enough to embrace the awful uncertainty of the creative process. None of these pre-requisites guarantees a relationship will last, but it does guarantee that we'll create something new. It guarantees that we'll create with our free will instead of from our conditioning. It guarantees that our fears won't be in the driver's seat.

Perhaps the right question is, how do I overcome my fears so that I stop creating from them? How do I learn to create from my True Self, from love?

(Hey there, if you're new here, I'm Coach Rachel K! I help people get past their triggers so they can create extraordinary love! You can learn more about what I do here, and you can get my free workbook Triggered No More here!)