Ever ask this question… How do you know your in love? or How do you know she’s the one?
I have asked that question numerous times, and always received the same cliche’ answer, “You just know.”
C’mon folks!!! Is that the best you can do? Is there not an adequate way to describe with words, why you “just knew,” I propose that there is and the following is my attempt:
I asked this question almost every time I dated a girl for more than 3 months. It was like a clockwork, if the gal made it past the 3-month trial period, she was immediately in the running to “be the one.” And I took advantage of this mile marker and asked various married acquaintances their take on “How do you know?” Without fail, their answer would be, “I just knew!!” AKA – the most impenetrable cliche’ answer of all time.
Talk about a conversation killer. Because at 3 months, I definitely did not know, hence the reason I was asking the question in the first place, dummy. Now that I’m engaged.. and have had time to think about “knowing” and “not knowing” I am going to venture an answer… the funny thing is that of all the girls that I have dated for over 3 months, Candace was the first one that didn’t illicit the knee jerk reaction of interrogating all my married friends. I actually didn’t have to ask that question, because I knew the answer. I knew I was in love with Candace, I knew she was the one… How did I know? I knew because I was never prompted to ask the question.
Now, I am not speaking for her, as I know our perspectives are different, just as yours might be different than mine, but hang with me because I think I may be on to something that will save at least 53.75% of you from ever asking this question again.
As Candace and I dated (which was long-distance in nature), we were always commenting on how comfortable it was, how effortlessly we moved through the DTR’s and other dating milestones. It wasn’t difficult to see that I was falling in love, nor was it difficult to perceive the same in her. I attribute some of this to the distance between us, which forced us to communicate – we enjoyed talking with each other and developed other topics, other than our day’s experience to talk about! We could spend hours talking about Religion, Politics, Books, and Culture and we would ask each other questions that we ourselves where mulling over. During the initial phone conversations we built a foundation of topics and interests that could be pulled from whenever a moment of awkward silence struck (which happens a lot on the phone, since you can’t break the silence with a kiss or three).
So, what I am trying to say is this: I never asked the question because before I knew it, I was head over heart in love with her!! I realize in hindsight, that in my previous relationships, I was always asking the question because I wasn’t in love with the girl, I was in love with the idea of the girl.
And when the idea of the girl conflicted with the reality of the girl, I must have subconsciously thrown up a red flag, in the form of a question posed to my friends… trying to glean some sort of explanation to the conflicting thoughts in my head. I loved the idea of being in love with said girls, and with Candace for the first time… I loved the girl. And that has made all the difference.
