It's Perfectly Okay To Not Know If Someone Is Your Forever Right Away

How do you know if someone is “the one”? The truth is, there’s no absolute way of knowing -- ever.

Most of what we experience in life amounts to little more than an illusion. I understand how real the emotions we experience feel to us.

I understand how our concerns, our passions, our realities seem so incredibly tangible, so honest and true.

The problem is, it’s all in our heads. It’s all in the minds of conscious beings -- if it weren’t for consciousness, nothing would matter because there would be no one or thing for it to matter to.

Nothing in life is for certain. Nothing in life is entirely guaranteed. Nothing in the universe, in existence, is constant or everlasting.

You can’t possibly know if someone is your forever because it isn’t possible to know.

The beauty of it is if nothing in this universe is for certain, then everything is possible. Literally everything. There is some chance of every possibility, every possible reality coming to being.

Regardless of whether you believe in predetermination or not, because you don’t know the outcome of a situation, it exists in a state of uncertainty, a state of possibility, a state of both existing and not existing, simultaneously.

So is falling in love, meeting the love of your life -- your forever -- a choice? A decision? Pure luck?

As everything in life is, it’s a combination of everything. It’s easy to get washed away by life, pulled downstream seemingly against our will.

But in reality, nothing is entirely against our will. Everything that happens in our lives, the things that seem to happen by chance, that seem to happen, not by our design but rather happen to us, are partially designed by our own hand.

We are where we are, in the situation we find ourselves in, living the life we are living because of the choices we made.

Even if some parts of our reality are out of our control, if you believe in free will, then you must accept that had you not chosen the path in life you chose, the predicament you are now finding yourself in would have not been a likely possibility.

Human beings love to simplify. We love to take a three-dimensional scenario and break it apart, removing what we believe to be fluff, what we reason to be trivial, having no effect on the outcome or meaning.

But the fact is that every time we remove a part of our existence from the equation, believing it does not affect the rest of reality, we are in fact altering that reality.

It’s true. Some things, events, concepts, experiences, thoughts, truths, states have less of an effect on their surrounding parts than do others, but people love to oversimplify.

We have this odd belief that if we ourselves aren’t capable of understanding it -- whatever it may be -- if we ourselves can’t process all the information, understand how all the pieces fit together, then all that we don’t understand the importance of must be unnecessary.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are limits to our cognitive abilities just as there are limits to everything else in life, in existence.

People will never fully understand the world nor the reality we exist in because we simply don’t have the processing power. We can’t keep track of all the connections.

So what does this all mean? It means we’re all shooting in the dark. We are all hoping we’re making the best possible choices, but without knowing any outcome for certain, you never know if the decisions you are making are going to take you down the path which you want to be taken down.

Of course, as with all possibilities, some have more of a chance of coming to fruition than others.

Some things are more or less likely to bring about a certain outcome than others.

We never know for certain whether or not we will reach our chosen destination, but there is honestly nothing more we can do than play the odds and hope for the best.

When you’re meeting someone new, someone you like, someone you are considering as a life partner, you can never be certain he or she will be your forever.

There are countless scenarios that are, in fact, out of your control that can change the outcome of any relationship, change the direction of any life.

Promises of an undying love are romantic -- maybe even necessary, if only because of the culture we’ve created -- but they amount to little more than wishful thinking.

You are just as likely to fall out of love with, or lose, someone you thought you’d love and hold forever as you are to not be able to let go of someone you never thought you’d have an issue letting go of.

As the saying goes, “Love works in mysterious ways.” The truth is those ways aren’t really mysterious.

There are cause and effect relationships to be found and understood, but love and life are so incredibly complex that trying to dig into it overwhelms us.

It’s not that you’re dumb -- relatively speaking, human beings are all dumb. We simply dub love as mysterious because we can’t comprehend its complexity.

You could meet the love of your life walking down the street and not realize it until after months and months of dating.

Just the same, you could fall for someone in an instance and spend the rest of your lives together.

It’s even possible to have dated the love of your life and lost him or her, only to realize the huge mistake you made.

Of course, there is always a possibility for a new love. There is always a possibility of starting anew and building a grander or different love, however, the exact opposite is also true.

I can’t say which is more likely because it depends on the circumstance, but as long as there is a possibility for love in your life, you need to do your best to aim for it.

You may succeed, you may fail -- there’s only one way to know for sure. It’s okay to not know if someone is your forever right away because, in reality, you never know.

You can hope. You can wish. You can even do your best to make it so. But at the end of the day, anything can happen.

Things out of your control can destroy just as things out of your control can create. All I can recommend is focusing on that which you do have some control over and then hoping for the best.

I’m afraid you’re not guaranteed a happy ending, but you definitely are in for a hell of a ride.

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