Many Gen-Xers grew up fixated on finding “the one.”
Yes, we were latch key kids and during our formative years the divorce rate more than doubled, leaving many of us with a cynical view of relationships. But we were also raised in part by the family television, growing up on a steady diet of rom-coms and sitcoms that had us rooting for “on-again, off-again” fictional couples between whom the differences were great and the sexual tension thick.
Rachel and Ross. Daphne and Niles. Mulder and Scully. Hell, Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts’ sweet-natured prostitute in Pretty Woman) and Edward Lewis. If you remember, Edward was the millionaire mogul who hired Vivian for a week, then fell in love and rescued her from a life of ill repute. I saw that film in college, and remember leaving the theater thinking, “What just happened?! Did he just climb the fire escape and literally rescue her? And why do I have a smile on my face?”
We ate up those stories. Never mind the fact that the couples were almost always heterosexual, the relationships usually began with disdain and/or toxicity, and we never got to see what happened after the happily-ever-after.
The epitome of the “will they or won’t they” couple in the ’90s was Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big of Sex and the City fame. Big repeatedly did Carrie wrong, and even married someone else in the midst of their saga. Yet she continued to pine for him, year after year, until they finally ended up together, with him flying across the Atlantic to rescue her from a negligent boyfriend and declaring on a Paris bridge that she had always been “the one.”
According to Giovanna Capozza, a relationship coach and my delightful guest on The More Beautiful Podcast, many women in our generation fell into the Carrie and Mr. Big Trap, thinking that there’s one perfect someone out there who will solve all our issues and make us deliriously happy for the rest of our lives. Many spent years in search of that person, to no avail.
In a recent article in Mic, writer Chloe Stillwell compares SATC with the new series Love Life, which is aimed at millennials and offers a more modern stance on the quest for love. Instead of showing a character in an “exhausting, constant search for ‘the one,’ Stillwell writes, “Love Life shows its characters feeling their way through a series of ‘ones,’ which is much more reflective of how picking a partner works these days.”
Additionally, in the new show, “the old traditions of marriage are less weighty, gender stereotypes have evolved and concepts like soulmates are generally understood as antiquated…For SATC, life was what happened while you looked for love, but in Love Life, love is what happens while you live your life.”
In the end, my podcast guest says, it’s not about finding “the one,” but about accepting love into your already beautiful life. Many successful women are still walking around feeling like something’s missing. In Giovanna’s view, however, each of them has the capacity to be “the one” for herself. “If you can accomplish that, you’ll be open to receiving love” from another—if that’s what you desire.
Whatever your romantic situation, you’ll want to tune in to this episode—the third in the More Beautiful Love & Relationship Series—and listen to my hopeful conversation with Giovanna, a self-confessed former love addict. With humor and compassion, she discusses her own journey to heal past relationship wounds, break dating patterns that weren’t working for her, and remove other obstacles that for years prevented her from finding the love she wanted. And yes, she offers strategies for those still out there looking for that special someone.
