she found me (not)

my skull is still reverberating with the irony of this situation. its even more ironic that im writing about this situation here, since this blog is one of the key players in this tale... but lets start at the beginning.

last night i posted my first entry into this blog; a blog that is intended to be my mumble and tumble thoughts about love, relationships, and finding the one. this morning (6am to be precise), my girlfriend breaks up with me.

why you may ask? because i didnt know if she was the one. KNOW being the key word here. part of the reason for this whole excersise was to sort out all my thoughts about her; because i really thought she could have been the one! but i didnt know... yet. and perhaps now i never will.

which brings me to my first point: how do you know if youve found the one?

lets forget for a second about all the hoops that we go through to actually find the one, im simply asking how do you know if youve found them? some people will say that you "just know". if you ask what exactly does "just knowing" feel like, you'll usually just get a shrug or some vague answer. now im not bashing them for not knowing what knowing feels like... hell, they get mad props for just finding it in the first place. but it nonetheless puts me in quite a quandary.

ok, lets accept this "just know-ing" business and proceed to the next question... when do you know if youve found the one?

i can accept that when you meet your "soul mate" that you will definately feel something different. lets not get into, how different and how do you know (see above). im more concerned with WHEN you feel this difference. some people will say that you "just know" as soon as you meet someone. if that rule holds true for everyone, then there should be no second dates. hell!!! there should be no first date either; you meet, you talk for 2 seconds and you either "know" or you dont. and if you dont "know" you keep on looking. to make matters more outrageous, if you DO know, then you should just get married on the spot. afterall if you already know, why wait?

this approach just doesnt work for me. if it did, that would mean that either everyone who is married is finding the one, or everyone is giving up and settling for somebody else. i imagine that its alot of the later and not much of the former, but nonetheless i still call bullshit!!!

so where does this leave me? well lets recap what we've "learned". when you find the perfect person for you, you just "know". when do you know? well you either know that she's the one immediately OR youll know sometime later. which brings us to the final question of the day: if you suspect, but don't "know" that someone is the one, when should you know by?

thats the real kicker for me in all of this. i dont care so much about HOW you know, i just want to know WHEN you should know by. i mean is there a cutoff date? if i dont know by X number of days, weeks, months, years, then i should presume its never going to happen?

logically, this seems to make the most sense. dating is designed to give us an idea of what a person will be like in various situations (both good and bad). from that we can also learn how we will react in the same situation with them. it gives us the opportunity to learn more about them (and conversely they learn more about us). shouldnt we experience this "knowing" sometime during the dating process?

which brings this whole discussion back to me. im alone (now) because i didnt "know" that my girlfriend was the one. no matter how hard i tried, no matter how much i thought about it, i didn't "know". at least i didnt "know" enough to commit the rest of my life to her (yet). but she could have been the one (if only i had been given enough time to find out).

Note: i totally understand that women do not want to spend time with a guy if he's never going to take the next step (why buy the cow blah blah blah). but i also dont think that women should rush this process either.