Determining if someone is The One may be more straightforward than you think.
For those men and women who are in the early stages of a relationship—dating, or even engaged—there’s often a lingering question in the air. Skeptical friends and risk-averse relatives alike may ask it.
Your girlfriend’s mother may turn to you at dinner party and ask, "I just have to know…what makes my daughter the one?" Your bachelorette party may be coming to its sloppy conclusion when your maid-of-honor blurts out, "Are you sure you wanna spend the rest of your life with him?"
The question all newly-committed couples face is this: how do you know you’ve committed to the right person…how do you know?
The question hangs in the back of some people’s minds as if it’s a great philosophical mystery—a question on par with “why are we here?” And adequate explanations are hard to come by.
"Well gosh," you might reply, "I just love her.” Or, "He just gets me." If you're not in a sharing mood, a simple "It's just a feeling…you know when you know" can get people off your back. But how do you know?
As a relationship coach, I’ve worked with seriously dating and engaged couples who are absolutely sure they want to get married…but couldn’t for the life of them tell you why. Of course, love is inherently hard to define and can be easily confused with lust, infatuation, orfriendship. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that this question lingers.
But despite the fact that many of the couples I work with can’t articulate their reason for “knowing,” I’ve noticed that there is a common thread amongst those couples who can’t wait to get down the aisle.
They all have one thing in common: a high level of satisfaction with the relationship.
Satisfaction, in its simplest terms, means that both partners are getting what they need from the relationship. It’s often the basis of that this is right feeling that men and women can sense but can’t communicate well. It’s one of the hallmarks of a romantic relationship that’s working.
So, how can satisfaction help you understand if you’re with the right person? Use the four tips below to understand how.
1. Assess how satisfied you feel in your current relationship.
This can be challenging. To make the task more manageable, I recommend breaking down the relationship into separate aspects (such as sex, finances, emotional intimacy, communication, etc.) and then assessing how satisfied you feel in each one.
If you feel highly satisfied in the major aspects of your relationship, you are likely with someone who’s an excellent match for you. Hopefully, knowing this will soften any doubting voice in your head.
However, if you find some important aspects of the relationship are lacking satisfaction, don’t fret! There are ways to address that too…
2. Ask yourself: have you been more satisfied in another relationship?
If you've directly experienced more satisfaction in a previous relationship than you do in your current relationship (for example, you found it much easier to express yourself with your ex than you do with your current partner), it would certainly benefit the relationship to tell your partner what would make you more satisfied.
You may not know exactly what you need to feel more satisfied, but starting the conversation is a good idea. Such mental comparisons to past relationships can become toxic.
3. …Or, can you easily imagine being more satisfied?
If you can easily imagine more satisfaction in a particular area of your current relationship, it would very likely benefit the relationship to tell your partner what you wish for. For example, if you know your sex life could be better with just a few tweaks, start making these adjustments happen. This is how you take your relationship to the stuff of dreams!
4. Determine if you need to do some self-work.
If you can't easily imagine more satisfaction, but you have an amorphous, lingering sense of dissatisfaction, this often indicates that you don’t yet know what you need from a relationship. And it’s very hard to get your needs met if you don’t know what your needs are.
This lingering feeling of dissatisfaction may indicate that you’d benefit from doing some self-work. It could help to be single for a while to connect with your deeper individual needs and values.
Give these tips a try and let me know in the comments if that little voice in your head is starting to quiet down!
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