All Of My Friends' Relationships Have Convinced Me 'The One' Isn't Real

If you haven't figured it out so far, I'm a complete and hopeless romantic. I'm in love with love. Well, mostly just the idea of it.

As each day goes on and another year is added to my life, I start to question the actual idea of "the one." I've been contemplating the notion there is one specific soul out there completely compatible to our own.

It's could just be my overabundance of bitterness taking over, but as life passes me by, I'm starting to wonder if the concept of having one person who we are meant for is even real.

Looking around at all the "functional" relationships in my life, there is one word that comes to mind: comfortable. Everyone seems comfortable, stable and content. Everyone seems happy enough.

What I don't see, however, is real, true remarkable love. There's no we-were-meant-for-one-another type of loves. No earth-shattering, head-over-heels examples exist in relationships surrounding me on a daily basis.

Perhaps all my friends and family have deserted the belief of "the one" and settled. Maybe they've impatiently grown tired of waiting around for a fictional person who may never appear, and they've just accepted the fate of this reality.

Maybe we are all just meant to be with someone whom we are comfortable with, someone who makes us laugh and someone we can rely on. Maybe we just need a person who helps makes it easier to get through each day and this life.

Maybe that's why were all struggling so much, constantly finding ourselves in an affair with pain. We're searching for something that possibly doesn't even exist and idolizing this imaginary individual whom is going to come save us from our brokenness, heal our souls and put back together all the shattered pieces of what use to be our hearts.

Are we expecting too much from love? Placing it upon a pedestal it doesn't belong upon? Worshiping the very concept of its existence?

By putting too much pressure on finding "the one," we forget to appreciate the people who currently exist in our lives. What if we have become too obsessed with the idea of meeting our soulmates? What if we fail to notice compatible individuals who have already proved their worth?

Is it possible that love is just another word for comfort? Finding a person who we feel secure with? An individual, who makes us feel safe and at ease? Someone to help lessen our ache?

What if we are only breaking our own hearts searching for this make-believe prospect of love? Are we just continually looking for the person who is going to change our entire world?

We can roll over and take this all as a depressing notion, or we accept it for the truth that it holds. Free ourselves from this prison we are captive in. Free ourselves from all the rejection involved with searching for another soul.

I'm not saying I don't believe in love. From what I can tell, I've been in love a few times. And if it wasn't real love, then at least I've been in love with the idea of another.

It always seems like meet all the wrong people at the right time, and all the right people at the wrong time.

That inner little girl — the young girl who has spent her whole life looking for this illusion of "the one" — is screaming inside of me. She's pleading for me to take back all these words. But, life and experiences have overcome and proved things differently.

I do believe that in time, we will find our happily ever after. We will find the storybook ending we have been longed for, but it might not appear in the way we have always fantasized it to look.

We may never find pure happiness if we keep searching for this one flawless person whom we have buried in immeasurable standards.

Each person we cross paths with is to help us find ourselves. We find the people we are meant to become.

The more we find ourselves, the less we need validation from others, and the less we crave the idea of another person making us whole. We begin to realize we are completely fulfilled on our own.

Maybe our greatest love story is falling in love with somone who has been along our sides since the very start. Maybe our perfect ending involves us putting together the pieces of our own lives and finally loving ourselves for everything that we are.

Maybe we, ourselves, are "the one" we have always been searching for this entire time.