Tsaiberspace

I was in polite company (I was a “+1″ at a summer BBQ party where I didn’t know anyone else very well), when a married person said: whenever one of my single friends asks me how to know if “she’s the one”, I always anticipate an engagement announcement soon after.

I was not as polite. In what was probably not my shining moment of social grace, I suggested that the optimism might be premature; the usual checklist-style answers provided to such a question (”she makes me laugh”, “we can be comfortable in silence without having to say anything”, etc.) might have opposite the expected effect. The one asking the question might silently go over the checklist, realize that nothing matches, and taking the checklist on authority (from a married person and who thus might be an authority on such checklists), decides that s/he is not the one, and calls the whole thing off.

Come on, Rob. This is supposed to be a summer BBQ, and you don’t even really know these people.

Fortunately, the company was not as graceless as me, and the conversation was soon steered to some other light topic. Eventually all of us went to our respective homes, and I am now insomniacally awake by myself staring at my laptop screen, pondering my social faux pas.

Is the question “How do I know if s/he’s the one?” really as unfairly stacked as I implied it to be? If marriage is already an ultimate expression of optimism, then should it therefore follow that any leading questions towards such are already stacked in favor of that conclusion, and thus this topic should just be left alone?

Or is it valid to suggest that the English-speaking population at large should be asking this question using less-biased language, such as “How do I know whether or not s/he’s the one” (or some other applicable grammatical construct, the implication being that in addition to “s/he is” and “maybe s/he is” [an answer that usually hintingly favors the positive outcome], “she is not” is also a valid conclusion)?

Maybe people don’t want to be unwittingly responsible for breaking up an outwardly happy pre-marriage relationship; if the responder afterwards washes their hands of the conversation, and the couple gets unhappily married, then the responder of course won’t be blamed later on for not stopping the marriage, right?

Shouldn’t one be happy to have prevented a train wreck? In fact, shouldn’t one try to stop any possible train wrecks, under the assumption that anything truly meant to be will easily overcome such a single negative conversation? It is amusingly difficult to consider a world where (bachelor parties and other such raucous gatherings aside) friends always actively discourage one another from pursuing a lifetime commitment to their one true love.

Or maybe people considering marriage (and the married people providing the solicited response) are already inherently optimistic, so they can’t help but ask such leading questions and provide such leadingly-optimistic answers?

There is no point to this self-conversation; I have no conclusions. I am just rehearsing what not to say at my next such social gathering.