On What Goes Through Your Head When You Think You May Have Met The One

What happens when you meet The One?

Saying no is easy. It’s so simple. No. No. No. No. It’s so easy to say.

Saying yes is terrifying. Because you only get to pick once. And because if a guy will give you everything that it takes to be your soul mate, is he The One?

How do you say yes?

What does it feel like?

How do you stop saying no? When you’re so good at it.

Saying yes means that you trust someone to be the one thing you’ve never been: faithful to someone.

How can you? And when you meet someone, and it is easy – when it is so, so easy, how can you not?

How can you stop staring at the ceiling at night because something real is happening and you’d deluded yourself forever that it wouldn’t?

Is this real? Is it another phase? Is it your settle-down phase that will disappear like all the rest because the parents don’t agree, or the brother hates him, or, worst of all, he winds up figuring out that you’re not worthy of that pedestal?

Is it normal to have someone scare the living daylights out of you because you kind of want to talk to him for the rest of your life, and you kind of want to run away as fast as you can, to Norway or someplace, while you still can?

Is it normal to cry on the phone because their sin costs you so much? And because everything you have ever done wrong in your life is now their problem?

Does it make you crazy when your right knee bounces up and down all day because for the first time in your life you can’t wait one.more.second for him to just end all of this and run off to the county courthouse with you?

And because you’re terrified of what will happen when he really wants to?

Is it normal to want so badly for him to just go away and stop looking at you like that because you’re so afraid you might just break down sobbing because he melts your soul? And for you to be so unspeakably thankful that he is grabbing your waist and won’t let go, because you really don’t know how to say that the second he lets go, you’re going to feel like crying for seventy-two hours?

Is it normal to cry when you get a text from your dad that says, “I don’t know if I like him or not?” with this big, friendly question mark, because it is the most devastating thing in the world, even though how can your dad know? It’s been a whirlwind. He can’t know. He has a clear head and you don’t.

It was a day. One day. You knew him three hours and you told your best friend that he was The One, and he is, which may have nothing to do with whether or not you ever get to marry him….or even kiss him.

Is it normal to keep the flowers he sent you on another desk because it aches for you to be so close to something that he loves so much?

Is it normal to feel like your life is ending if you haven’t heard from him in forty minutes (eye appointment, or more likely he has fallen out of love completely) and to be totally frightened when his best friend says: So! Summer wedding for sure, because the only one single thing in the world worse than not knowing is knowing?

You want to keep it at bay forever, because you’re an incurable pessimist.

Because no one you love this much could ever work.

Because there is no way God is THAT good.

And then you cry because He is that good. And because even though He is good, He may not give you this thing. And because He is not wrong if He doesn’t. But you still hope, you hate yourself for hoping, that He might.

Is this what all of those stupid married people called love at first sight? They acted so naturally, and you wanted to shake them. Until it was you, and you had nothing to say publicly. Just: It’s going fine. When what you want to say is:

I’m exploding.

I can’t keep waiting.

I can’t stop waiting.

I would wait for you the rest of my life.