How long before you knew he/she was the one?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve met a woman, and within a week I knew. She felt the same thing. We’re both divorced, mature adults who’ve been on plenty of dates and have had our share of relationships. We both know how strange it is to be feeling this way so quickly, and acknowledge the possiblity that what we feel may simply be temporary infatuation.

But as it is, we’re sort of stuck with our current feelings which are only getting stronger the more we get to know each other. What I’m wondering is:

  1. How long before you knew?
  2. What do you think is an acceptable amount of time before accepting/acting on it? (i.e., if you “know” after the first date, is that totally unacceptable, or does it depend on the circumstances?)
  3. Say, like me, you “knew” very quickly. Would you trust it or take the more cautious route and wait a while before acting on it?
  4. Do you know anyone who knew right away (I guess I’d define this as within the first month), and if so, how long did it take, and what is the current status of their relationship?

Thanks in advance!

2

Our first date was a Saturday night. He told me the next day that I would marry him. He didn’t ask, he told. Before the next Saturday, I kinda figured he was right. Three weeks later, we were married. Coming up on 20 years.

When and how to act on it is as individual as those involved. I was nearly 30 and had been on my own for more than 10 years. If my 17-y/o came home and told me she’d met the one, I’d be shipping her off to a convent in Switzerland. Or Bolivia - either way.

I don’t know if there is a single good answer to your question, but now you’ve got my side of the story. :slight_smile:

3

In my case of my ex-wife, about two months after our first date.

Of course, it then took me about two more years to realize I was completely wrong.

4

We met when she was engaged to someone else. With in a month after that relationship broke up we were pretty certain we were going to be married. We actually announced it two months later. We have been together for 12 years now married for 11. There has never been any question for either of us as to whether it was “the real thing” in those years.

BTW: I had nothing to do with the break up. We spent time together but there was no funny business while she was promised to another.

5

I wouldn’t date my fiance for three years. I told him then that he scared me because he could be the one. In January, when he proposed a year after we did start dating (hey I was scared, what can I say?) – I told him I’d been right :slight_smile:

6

Thanks, FCM. Did you feel skeptical of your feelings? Any desire to wait longer than three weeks before getting married?

Duke, in retrospect, would you have done anything differently? Were there any warning signs you now realize you missed? Do you think you’ll ever fall for someone that quickly again?

7

I knew the first time I ever looked at Misery Loves Co. that he was the one. But I also knew it wasn’t the right time. So, we became best friends, and for over 5 years hung out with each other and dated other people. By the time we started dating, there was no doubt for either of us. We’ve been together for 5 years now. Still no doubts. But I think that the time we were friends is what really made all of this possible. And there are no secrets… I know his ex-es and he knows mine, dirty secrets and all.

8

I think I “knew” after talking to her on the phone for the first time (2 hour phone call), and meeting her in person a couple of weeks later just confirmed my first impression. It took a few months for me to convince her that I was the one, or so I thought. It turns out that she was also pretty sure right from the beginning, but had no idea how I felt and was afraid to come on to strongly.

For the record, that first phone call was on June 27, 2002, and we are getting married at the end of this month. We are both in our mid-thirties and have (hopefully) had enough experience to know what we really want from a relationship and a life-mate.

One other thing… I’ve had many crushes or infatuations before, and this really feels different to me. Infatuations are purely physical reactions to certain visual cues and, although they may cause some pretty intense feelings, I can say now that they’re not really related to the feeling of love that I have for my fiancee.

Good luck!

Barry

9

Almost immediately.

I was dating a girl my first year in college. I met her roommate and BANG!

Took some convincing (of her…girl mark1 wanted me the hell out of her life at that point)(with reason) but we started dating right after Spring Break that year (I’d just turned 19) and I was sold right away.

It’s been 17+ years now. Married for 10 this coming July.

Oh, there have been patches where both of us has wondered if we’d committed too young…without enough experience. But we’ve gotten through them.

10

After our first date, Mr. Honey and I were inseparable, after 4 months, we got married. It’ll be our 14 year anniversary in October.

11

In lieu of a more drawn-out answer (yep, posting from work again), yes I’d do something differently. For one thing, I’m going to make sure I know at least one person who’s relatively honest about her past and her personality before I make a commitment, even if it’s just a commitment in my own head. There were some things in my wife’s past that I didn’t know about until after I was “sure” she was the one. (Nothing to do with other relationships, but not something I want to talk about right now.) I might have been more careful if I’d known about it, but being “so sure” I thought we could work it out. I’m not saying the breakup was her fault, we were both at fault. But things might have turned out very differently.

As for if I’d fall for someone that quickly again, of course I will, I’m a guy fer cryin’ out loud! :smiley: But commitment-wise, I’m probably going to be a lot more careful.

12

I knew after the first real date we went on. We were both 19 and in our sophomore year at college.

He was pretty slow in picking up the clues that I wanted to go out with him. Even direct “lets go get dinner” was met with a “you don’t have to pretend you like me” kind of attitude. Alas I prevailed and we had the most incredible evening. Dinner, arcade, ice cream at this little place by the river I haven’t thought about in years and a long walk by the river. We stayed out almost all night and I just knew.

That was in 1991… circumstances being what they were it took us a few years to get married (I proposed to him over Thanksgiving break that year) We’ve been inseparable since then and have been married almost seven years and are brewing up our second child. I still get giddy when I tell stories about our life together and I can not imagine my life without him.

The only thing I wish is that we had been able to get married sooner. But practicality prevailed and he finished his degree first. I think you have to listen to your instincts (what else are they there for?) But you also have to listen to your head! Lots of people in our families figured it was infatuation that would pass but I’d been infatuated before and it was nothing like this

Good luck to you… enjoy your relationship… life’s too short and too unpredictable to not gamble just a little on love.

13

11 minutes after we met…give or take 10 minutes or so.

we met online, at the old pacificpages wheel of time bbs and chat september 2, 1997. i wasn’t really looking, and she was recently separated…but things just worked out. started the phone thing (she was in arkansas, i was in pennsylvania)…we were both in college. i flew down to see her new year’s eve. on the morning of january 3rd, i proposed. then i had to fly back to Philly. very sad. :frowning:
we got married may 12, 2000, and have lived in arkansas since. It seemed like forever before we could actually ‘be together’…but now i can’t imagine how we did it…or how we ever made it apart.
she’s my soulmate. she gave me 2 very great stepsons, and we had our first together last january. all is well.

goes off to find his wife to love on her

-stonebow, husband to FaerieBeth

14

For me, it was around the second date or so. You know…once we had gotten all the “getting to know the basics of you” conversations out of the way. By then I knew that he met all my pre-decided must haves:

Close to and on good terms with his family? Check
Has or will have a good job with some goals and ambition? Check
Likes animals? Check (In fact, he loves them even more than I do, if such a thing is possible…one of my favorite things about him :D)
Physical Attraction is there? Check

If he hadn’t met even one of these qualifications, I would have kicked him to the curb no matter how “in like” I was with him. But he met them, and I was VERY “in like” with him, so at that point I knew that unless something came out of the blue to surprise me, this guy was most likely going to be the one. “Twu Luv” came a little bit later, but my logical mind knew that he was a very likely candidate almost from the get-go.

We got married last November, btw, after dating almost 3 years. So far, so very good!

15

Oreo, what you just described is almost exactly how I felt. I knew after the first date that unless I found something repellant out about her, she was it. I also had my deal-breakers, which, after about an hour, I knew weren’t a factor. I spent the next week expecting to find out something bad, but instead I kept falling further in love.

Thanks, everyone, for the responses. I feel much better about things! I even showed her this thread and I think she was a bit comforted as well.

16

Why?

17

I think that you have to define “acting on it”: do you mean saying “I love you”, moving in together, buying a house together, moving accross the country to be together, starting a baby? Within a few days of meeting my husband I was comfortable enough to move in with him (though I still had my place, because of the lease). I wasn’t comfortable enough to start a baby for three or four years after that (we still haven’t actually started a baby, but not because of commitment levels). It all comes down to balenceing risk vs. benefits: the risk of having to move my stuff again is a pain in the ass but not the end of the world: sharing a child with someone you didn’t like or repect demands a whole new level of confidence, and I think demands something beyond the gut-level sureness: it demands a shared history and an actual, demonstrated compatability Everything else falls somewhere between the two.

It seems to me that if you feel a massive rush to “do something”, that’s a pretty good sign that you are convincing yourself that an infatuation is, in fact, “the one”. For example, after about a year I fel secure enough with my husband that I was willling to marry him, but it took another couple years before we got around to it. I think that had I been in a paniced rush to get married, it would have been a sign that deep down I had doubts. YMMV: for someone who really values traditions, the marrige would be more meaningful and they would probably have tied the knot more quickly. My point still stands, however, that if you are feelinga vauge urgeto “act” and you don’t even know how, exactly, that you want to act, it may be a sign that it would be a good idea to do nothing irrrevocable just yet: after all, if they are “the one” (I really hate that phrase, by the way), you’ve got decades and decades ahead of you–what’s the rush?

18

My boyfriend knew it when he met me. We met two years ago, on the off chance that he was in my town to visit my sister. We were introduced, and the entire 4 hour conversation afterwards was like chatting with your best friend. Two days later, he told my sister that he was going to marry me. Unfortunately I was dating someone else, but he said he knew we were going to end up together.

Flash forward to July 2002. I get dumped. He becomes Rebound Guy, willingly. Next thing I know, we’re mad for each other. By December, I had made plans to move to Baltimore, and he became Boyfriend. Sometimes you just never know how long it’s going to take. Heck, my parents knew each other for six weeks before they got married, and this year will make 38 years together.

Good luck!

19

Because I am extremely close to my own family, and I wanted someone who could accept that and who would want to share that kind of life with me.

Also, I have had in the past several relationships with men whose family lives were horrible, and they were all negatively affected by it. (This goes for people who were just friends, too.) It created all sorts of issues in the relationships. In my own experience, children that come from broken homes have emotional problems that I just didn’t have the energy or desire to cope with.

Let me just say…I know that’s not fair. I know that there are lots of people out there who are perfectly normal and mentally healthy despite having divorced parents, etc. (As there are people who come from solid families who are completely screwed in the head.) I just went with what my personal observations told me.

Also, if I can self-psychoanalyze myself for a moment–I think I made that line in the sand for myself because I had finally recognized a pattern I was following when choosing guys to date, and I wanted to put a stop to it. In the past, I was always falling for the guy who needed me to be emotionally strong for him. There was my first real boyfriend in high school, who I started dating a few months after his father had killed his mother. That was a whole long complicated saga, and he leaned on me and my family heavily during that time. I’m glad I was able to be there for him (we’re still friends), but I left the relationship a year later completely drained of any of my own energy.

Then there was the guy I dated just prior to meeting Mr. Oreo. He was almost completely alienated from his family. I tried so hard to fill that gap for him…to let him share my happy relationships with my family…to be his family for him. But he (the jerk) didn’t “do families.” Obviously, didn’t work. I came out of that relationship needing therapy and a prescription for anti-depressants.

These are just a couple of examples. So, there was a definite pattern that I was determined to break…and I did. I’m very, very happy now as a result. Mr. Oreo and I lean on each other, and I feel like I receive as much energy from him as I give out to him, so there’s a nice balance to it.

Wow…I kind of went off, didn’t I? Bet you didn’t expect a long essay in answer to your one-word question. Sorry about that–it’s just something I’ve put a lot of thought into.

20

Lola and I met at work and I have to say that our respective situations weren’t exactly ideal for developing a relationship of any sort.

The moment I saw her I was simply awestruck with how beautiful she was and was even more awestruck when I discovered that she was also brilliant, witty, and charming. I was not the only person to be smitten by her charms and she had a few very obvious admirers… she is truly beautiful beyond words.

I kept telling myself that despite my attraction to her and the fact we were becoming the best of friends, nothing else would be possible between us because she was married.

She wasn’t happily married and her ex was a mean and petty little man who only kept her through threats that he would take their children if she ever left him. She had tried to leave before but had stayed for the sake of their children and because of her fear of what he might do.

So we became the best of friends and I planned to keep things this way despite our growing affection for each other. Everyone around us seemed to take notice of this and a few close friends even commented that we would make a perfect couple, those comments were painful to bear as they suggested something that I did not think was possible.

So we were sitting together after work one afternoon having coffee and chatting. She was facing me and had put her foot on my chair as she talked and she reluctantly said that she had to go home and couldn’t linger any longer. I watched her walk away and out the door and felt like all the life had just been sucked from me, I could barely breathe. I realized then just how much I loved her.

A few days later we went out for coffee after a late shift and we talked long into the night. I told her that she was my best friend, I told her that I loved her and most of all… I wanted her to be happy and do what she thought was right. If she had decided to stay with her husband until her children were grown I would be writing about the woman I love that I cannot be with.

The last seven years have passed in what seems to be like the blink of an eye and we love each other more and more as each day passes. We decide every day to love one another and we are as passionate about each other now as we were when we first made that decision to be together.

In case anyone wonders… the threats that Lola’s ex made were just that. We are raising the children from her first marriage (the heir and the spare) and also have two beautiful daughters… they get that from their mom.