How a Man Can Tick Every Box and Still Not Be “the One”

I met a guy who was perfect on paper, but there was one vital ingredient missing: love.

I was 28 when a two-year relationship came to an end. For a time, I had thought that it was going to be the relationship of my life, but somewhere in those two years, that feeling changed.

Waves of anxiety started to ripple through my body at unexpected moments and I did my best to repress them. I didn’t tell anybody, including my boyfriend, that I was having doubts. As time went on, the anxiety got worse and I could no longer deny my apprehension.

There was no one event that brought it to an end, just a slow, steadily increasing sensation that we weren’t right for each other after all.

Of course, this didn’t fit very well with my life plan. According to the schedule, we should have been getting married, buying a house together and getting a dog. By 30, life would have been all sorted out. So not only did I lose the love and companionship of the relationship but also the vision of my future with him. Despite being the one who ended it, I was devastated.

At the time of the break-up, I was living in London, and there is nothing like getting over the loss of a relationship than getting on Tinder. I went on a few dead-end dates to take my mind off my sadness, without any real interest in pursuing something serious.

And then one night, four months post-relationship, I met Joe. Joe was nervous and sweet and was wearing a lovely checked-shirt. The longer that we talked, the more I realised that he ticked every box that I’d ever written, back in my teenage days when writing a list of desirable characteristics for a future husband was part of most conversations with my girlfriends.

He was smart. He was well educated. He had traveled widely and lived abroad. He was tall and had blue eyes that sparkled with life. He was ambitious and career-driven. And more important than all of that, he was emotionally literate, something which I had missed in my last relationship.

On my first date with Joe, we talked without stopping until we got kicked out of the pub at closing time. It was the first date that I had been on in a long time which didn’t feel like a series of awkward interview questions. We had barely scratched the surface of all that there was to say to each other and we quickly arranged a second, then a third, then a fourth date.

And before I knew it, I was in another relationship and the life plan was back on track. I marveled at the fortune of our meeting.

But as the weeks passed, I noticed something strange. Despite how absolutely perfect for me he seemed to be, I wasn’t falling in love with him. I started noticing mannerisms of his that annoyed me, and worse, made comments about them. He was so besotted at that point that he accepted my criticisms and told me that he would improve. Then I would feel so guilty for having been so brutally honest with him that I would be overly loving to try and make up for it.

Sometimes it felt like I was putting on a show for the Perfect Girlfriend Awards — holding his hand and kissing it, draping my arms over his shoulders and kissing him on the cheek in a restaurant, smiling just a little too brightly when he told me a story. For every occasion that I was cold and pushed him away, I made up for it with a shower of affection.

Crunch time came when he told me that he loved me for the first time and I could no longer kid myself that I might be able to feel the same way. He was crushed. I felt terrible for the pain that I caused him, yet I was relieved that it was over.

Looking back, I should have ended it when I first saw the writing on the wall. But I was so busy buying into the fantasy of our perfect future that I didn’t consider the true reality of the relationship. I was so seduced by the boxes that he ticked that I thought love had to follow — it was just a matter of time, but I was wrong.

For a long time afterward I was single and I ditched the rigid notion of a life plan. I moved to South America and lived in the moment. And when I was least expecting it, I really did fall in love.

I learned that love cannot be calculated or predicted by the number of boxes ticked on a page.

Love isn’t nasty or critical, and it accepts people for who they are, rather than trying to fix them. Neither is love something that you can convince yourself to feel.

The most important thing that I learned though, is that it is better to be single and to focus on loving yourself, your friends and family than to be in a relationship without love.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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