Aileen Santiago

Real love will be a bulldozer. 

You will meet them in a calamitous fashion — as your maid of honor or best man will recount at your wedding with a sweet smile — and the world, for a moment, will stop. You’ll glance over one another and a flicker of recognition will jolt through you as a comfortable warmth blossoms in your chest. “It’s you,” you’ll think, as tentative belief quickly turns to knowledge.

Home will be their arms; their dishevelled hair in the morning your favourite sight. As you go gray, you will find solace in their enduring affection as they gaze upon you. When you settle under the earth, religion will bear no importance — you will find them in your next life, purgatory, or paradise. 

Love is, and always will be, the reason for everything.

I don’t know where I obtained this perception of love from. Perhaps it was the countless books, films and songs I’d absorbed over the years that articulated such a vision; the hopelessly romantic notion of two fated people becoming one. My ambition was quickly fixed: “You have to find the one, and ideally, you have to find them young.”

But love, though often portrayed as an inevitable and all-consuming force, is hardly ever so. It creeps up. It sickens. It withers away. As we age, we’re forced to choke down the bitter pill: love isn’t guaranteed, nor does it always stay. 

After all, Charlie and Nicole never read aloud their letters in “Marriage Story.” Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy dies. For every starry-eyed love ballad, there’s a tear-stained tune about the aftermath. 

So, what’s the point of it all? Is real love — the brilliant, earth-shattering discovery of “the one” — a mere game of luck; a happenstance, transient occurrence that only some of us are fortunate to experience? Were happy endings truly just a gimmick sold to a doe-eyed populace?

I have experienced “the moment” three times in my life. Three moments when, upon meeting someone, a quiet intrigue entered my mind. Through our connections, my belief in “the one” was briefly confirmed — maybe I wasn’t chasing a futile fantasy after all.

I met the first when I was 13.

I was standing at a traffic light when he spotted me. He came over to speak. No part of the conversation was particularly notable (as one would expect, for we were barely on the cusp of adolescence) but looking at him for the first time, something in me clicked. “I don’t know why I’m writing about this, but it feels important,” I scribbled in a diary, tucking my sentiments away for a future version of myself to rediscover. But I soon changed schools and he faded into the crevices of my mind, a ghost from a time past I expected to quickly forget.

Yet, four years later, my scrawled words returned to ring true. Sat at a bar, an accidental run-in on the last day of term became an intentional reunion. One hour turned to five. Warmth flooded through my veins as our words blended together without pause. “I can’t talk to anyone the way I talk to you,” he said, and I smiled in a grateful wonder.

Was this it? Could this really be it?

“It’d be a great story,” my friends assured me. “The four-year gap. The coincidental meeting. The way you bounce off each other. It could be so good,” they urged.

But I did not fall in love with him. Exams began; we ceased meeting; he went to university across the ocean, and so did I. Had our lives been a carefully crafted narrative scripted for “forever,” perhaps things could have been different. 

All I know is that we stood still for a moment, and my world continued to turn in his absence.

The second person I met months after the first. She was electrifying. Her hazel-green eyes promised terror and excitement, and at 14 I was hopelessly smitten. Weekends became time to spend together in innocent and tepid adoration ready to recount to our friends on Monday. Days stretched to months and she became a fulcrum in my life. The earth stilled again; I waited with bated breath for a sign of my realized ambition.

But the tide receded after the wave, and our lives continued. 

The third remains difficult to qualify. His name is broken glass that crunches underfoot. But in the dull crackles of the empty sparks I lived within, I learned what affection is not, and what the pursuit of a singular connection could, and should, be.

Perhaps, the pursuit of “the one” isn’t the seemingly endless search for your long-separated other half. Perhaps, it is about the myriad of connections we form that leave us indelibly shaped and forever touched. 

The discovery of “the one” is never guaranteed. But that does not mean you should avert the fleeting, but worthy prospect of love that appears in a series of promising moments.