Why Finding "The One" Isn't Easy

When women look for relationships, they sometimes expect certain parts to come easily.

No one would sit around and wait for his/her dream job to come around. No one would say, “with the right career, I won’t have to work for it. I’ll just sit back and it’ll come to me.”

Instead, we go to grad school and take less-than-glamorous jobs and work our asses off to move up one (tiny) step on the ladder.

Yet most of us would say that finding a life partner is just as important as a good career, if not more so. So why, then, do we go out and ruthlessly pursue the latter but refuse to put any work in to finding the former?

Most of us wouldn’t think twice about looking for a job online. And if our friend said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna use Monster, because, I dunno, it’s not really as authentic—like, our parents used to look at the Help Wanted ads and mail in their applications. I think it should go back to being like that,” we’d tell her she was crazy.

But when our friends are opposed to online dating and events targeted at meeting guys, we see their points. (This isn’t to say that all dating sites and networking events are worth trying, but a lot of people seem morally opposed to even dabbling in these resources.)

It may seem unfair to compare “love” to a job search, but isn’t that what it’s really like? It’s about finding someone who both possess the qualities you’re looking for in a partner and finds traits in you that he wants in a girlfriend. You’re looking for a “good fit,” the same way you look for the best job that you’re qualified for.

(Not to mention the fact that an abstract idea about love is a lot less important than things like compatibility and similar values, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Of course, many of us grew up hearing stories about our parents, or grandparents, or friends of grandparents, who met when they weren’t looking for love and wound up being soulmates.

It makes for a great story, but it also makes us wonder. Back in the 30s, 40s, 50s, when most of these matches presumably took place, women depended on men for economic support the same way women today need a job to pay their rent.

At the same time, various world wars decimated the male populations in Europe (and, to some extent, the U.S.). So these women needed husbands to survive, and, at the same time, they faced stiff competition for eligible bachelors. And we’re expected to believe that the ones who found husbands sat around waiting for it to happen?

We’ve tested this theory before. We probed our grandparents on specific details of their courtship, and (without airing any specific family laundry) while one set did seem to just fall in love, one of our grandmothers very actively pursued our grandfather, but she leaves out most of those details when she retells the story.

Perhaps that’s because women were expected to be ladylike and wait to be pursued by potential suitors. And even though it’s been decades, our mothers (and grandmothers) still want to project these images when they tell their stories.

This isn’t to say that women should go after men the way they go after Tory Burch flats at a Bloomingdales sale. But when we tell ourselves that, with the right guy, everything will be easy and we won’t have to work, we’re probably doing more harm than good.

So if you are really looking to meet someone, and you aren’t have much luck at The Front Page, why not try kickball or OKcupid? If you do end up meeting your future spouse, you can take a page from our grandparents’ book and tell an alternate version of the truth when someone asks how you met.