How do we know when we have met "the one"?

Today's topic is about the elusive idea of "the one" and how we know if we have met this person: in general, this blog will likely be on generalized topics pertaining to love since I don't want this to turn into a livejournal focusing my daily events.. I would much rather talk to you about my ideas about relationships and maybe a few other crazy topics that make their way into my mind. Can I be your Carrie Bradshaw, fellow blogger users? :)

Has anyone here ever met this "the one"? We see people who claim to have met the one, but usually, we can see problems they don't, or we find out that the relationship isn't quite as perfect as we might have thought. While no relationship is perfect, and no single person is perfect, are there people out there who are perfect for us? I want to believe so, but I am not convinced. I have been too often disappointed in people and relationships, yet what keeps me open to the idea of pursuing a future relationship is this notion of the one.

More recently, however, I have started to believe that there is not one person who we are meant to be with. I don't believe in a cosmic order to the universe that makes perfect pairs of people destined to meet. And I believe that this concept of "the one" that we have come to accept as a community, we have accepted only with a partial degree of scepticism: to us, the one is more of an ideal, not a reality, much like the American dream.

On the other hand, I also don't think that love does not exist, or at least, I refuse to subscribe to that idea. I think that there are actually many "the ones" and that there are any number of people whom we can be perfectly happy with and could very easily spend the rest of our lives with under the right circumstances. I myself have been in love three times, and I know that at least two of these times, I could have been extremely happy if I had spent the rest of my life with that person.. the problem I encounter is not only that these relationships don't work out but that I tend to find myself falling for some idea of progressivism.. I tend to pretend that each new relationship is better than the next, that this new person is "the 'real' one," and that this time everything will work out, but I often wonder if that is truly the case, or if I am just fooling myself. Bloggers, I am not sure what to think.. what do you think?

Best,

Andi