One of the unexpected joys of the priesthood is the questions that children and teenagers randomly ask me. I’ve been asked all sorts of questions ranging from “Does God wear pants?” to “When we die but before the final resurrection, are our souls still male and female?”
Since I’m a married priest, I also have the honor to field all sorts of questions about my family and marriage. Recently, one of my high school students asked me how I knew, leading up to our marriage, that my wife was “the one.”
Anyone who has ever been asked a variant of that question knows it’s not at all easy to answer. It feels inadequate to simply list the things about your spouse that you find winsome, as if that’s enough to explain your love. Knowing my wife is “the one” could never be about making a checklist and comparing her to other women, as if once she filled enough of my criteria and I realized that, out of all the girls in the world, she was the only choice. Love is much deeper than that, and far more elusive of expression. I struggle to really get to the heart of it, the reality of our bond.
In reflecting more on that question later, I realized that I struggle to answer it because I don’t actually believe in the concept of “the one.” Some people might use different words, phrasing the question as how you know you’ve found your soulmate. It seems to me that approaching marriage as the matching of two soulmates is dangerous, and we should be careful how (and if), we use the word “soulmate.”
What are we really finding?
During dating, fixating on finding “the one” or a “soulmate” can actually short-circuit the search for a spouse. It may sound romantic to say you’re holding out for the perfect person set aside just for you from all eternity, but in reality it means you’re on an impossible search. No one is perfect, and if there is only “one” person for you in the whole entire world, isn’t that an inhuman amount of pressure?
What if you choose one college instead of another and miss meeting your soulmate, are you out of luck? If you turn left instead of right and don’t bump into each other, are you doomed to lives of perpetual loneliness? I think that this cannot be the case. If there’s only one person out there for each of us and a million tiny decisions lead up to meeting that person, it would mean that God doesn’t really give us freedom in any aspect of our lives.
I even wonder if the myth of the soulmate is causing widespread damage to the marriage rate because we feel pressure to ourselves be perfect and find someone who is perfect. If it’s anything less, there’s the misapprehension that it can’t possibly be the right relationship. People are afraid to marry because they know they have personal flaws and are anxious they aren’t ready or it isn’t the right match. Maybe there’s an idea that the better (perfect) option is still waiting down the road somewhere. This probably isn’t true.
So, how did I know my wife was “the one”? Well, I guess I didn’t. When I got down on one knee and proposed, I suspected she was the one. I strongly suspected it. I knew I loved her more than anything or anyone. But she really wasn’t my “one” until we actually got married.
Now she's the one
Think about what marriage does, what it accomplishes. It spiritually makes two persons into one. When my wife and I made our vows, I became the one for her and she for me. Through active choice and commitment, by saying the words out loud that created an unbreakable bond, we gave our imperfect hearts away to each other. I trusted my destiny to her and united myself to her in a way that very much means she’s now the only “one” for me.
Before marriage, it’s my opinion that there are many possible options for a spouse. It isn’t the case that, if one relationship breaks up, God doesn’t have another option. God doesn’t want us to be unhappy, and even if we miss one good match it doesn’t mean there aren’t more possible matches out there. It’s true that God has a perfect plan for every single one of us, and it’s also true that, no matter what we do with the freedom he provides, no matter our choices or what circumstances life throws out way for good or ill, he uses everything for the good. He takes our choices and molds them into his perfect plan. What makes any spouse “the one” is the way a couple builds their faithful commitment, the risk they take to trust each other, the mistakes they make together, the sacrificial love they share, and ultimately, their vows.
Before our marriage, I don’t know if my wife was “the one.” All I know is that I came to love her dearly, made my choice to give myself to her, and we built our life together. Over the months of our courtship, I’d come to trust her and knew that, even if we were imperfect, even if I didn’t know what the future held, that marrying her was worth the risk.
After marriage, we built our destiny together and, in the sharing of our lives, became stronger and more unified. In saying yes to each other, we stepped into a sacramental reality and a happiness so vast we never could have predicted or planned for it.
