The Idea That You’ve Met ‘The One’ is a Myth
The attendant, you might say, got lucky. He did not see this encounter coming. In his defense, who is ever ready for an encounter with a sociopath? But like lovers confronted with a threat to their relationship, he does not turn away from the challenge. The outcome of his choice is more directly a matter of luck, but like lovers who choose to meet rather than retreat from a challenge, he accepts that he must make a choice. There is no grand plan for the universe. There is no inevitability. One must choose, and let the chips fall where they may.
I was recently in a conversation among friends who were thinking about the prospect of starting a family someday. One friend said I’m just not ready right now. He is in his early thirties. He has a good career. He loves to watch and play basketball. He’s an introvert who enjoys time to himself. He worries that family life will disrupt the life he has going for himself.
To which I reply, it will.
There is no escaping it. Starting a family is a watershed. It creates new responsibilities. It imposes new obligations. It forces a whole new set of compromises in your life.
But even knowing all that, there is no way to prepare for it. Sure, one can be more or less mature about it. One can be in better or worse financial straits. One can be more or less eager to start a family at a given point in his life. And it is true that some people are custom-made to be parents, whereas others are less so. But whether you are a family man or not, whether you are at a better time in your life or not, the ultimate realization that you have is: you are never ready.
You don’t know exactly when love is going to strike, and when it does, you are already wedded to your own way of doing things. Family brings a host of responsibilities that can shock the system of a long-lived bachelor who has known little but the leisure of answering only to oneself. He is not ready. But life is not a plan. It is not a blueprint that demarcates a clean threshold at which point one suddenly becomes ready to fall in love and start a family. It is, to borrow from the title of former president George W. Bush’s book, a series of decision points.
In life, you don’t follow a plan like an automaton. You strive to make good decisions. There was never any guarantee I would meet Kara. Any number of things that happened could have happened otherwise. I could have stayed in New York and never moved to Washington, D.C. I could have decided not to join the YMCA gym where I met her. Kara may never have signed up for boxing class at the YMCA if she did not work with a colleague who taught boxing class and convinced her to come to his class after she told him about a stranger who had groped her on the Metro. The list of contingencies goes on and on. In retrospect, it all seems like a plan. But it seems that way only through the lens of hindsight bias. Much of life is the result of choices you make in response to the contingencies of happenstance.
Two years after Kara and I met, after nine months of pregnancy, Kara started to feel severe and frequent contractions at 10pm at night. Though she was due in two weeks, nature had decided not to cooperate. There was no delaying it. We had to get to the hospital. We were there all night, and at 6:03am the next morning, my daughter was born. Having been without sleep the entire night, in a cold room with beeping machines and doctors dressed in blue gowns and face masks, I suddenly heard a newborn cry. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say or how I was supposed to react. I just knew I was not dreaming and my child was now here. It was time to meet my fate. The coin toss had come. I had to call it, even if I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t because Kara was ‘the one’, but because my fate had delivered her, and now a daughter, to me, and I had to embrace it, or run away.
