So you don’t believe in soul mates?

Well, the rational part of me doesn’t. But despite what people may think after reading my piece, I really am a romantic. I still would like to meet a guy that I have this very visceral connection with, and that, to me, is a soul mate. But do I actually think there’s one person who’s my soul mate out there? Absolutely not. I think there are several people that any one of us could be with. Which makes me seem like more of a loser, because if there are dozens of soul mates out there, or potential guys I could be perfectly happy with, and I haven’t even married one of them, what does that say about me? If there’s just one and you haven’t found him, there’s a reason you’re still single. He’s a needle in a haystack.

You refer in your piece to “one-stop shopping”—the idea that people are looking for partners who fulfill their every qualification.

You know, I was saying to a friend the other day, “I really want to find a guy who’s my best friend”—something ridiculous like that. And she said, “But you already have a best friend. It’s me.”

I think when we’re younger and we’re dating and we’re trying to find our place in the world, we want that person who will be involved in almost every aspect of our lives. When you’re older, you say, “I’m really fulfilled in all these areas of my life, but you know, it would be nice to share that with somebody. But I don’t need the one-stop shopping necessarily.”

Also, by now I’ve heard so many of my married friends complain that they never see their spouses because they’re both so busy raising the children and going to work every day. So even if they found the one-stop shopping, they don’t spend enough time together to enjoy it.

So is one-stop shopping counterproductive, like Voltaire’s “the best is the enemy of the good”?

No one person is going to have all of the qualities you’re looking for, so if you’re always worried about what’s missing, you’re going to be perpetually lonely and frustrated. It’s human to think, I wonder if there’s something better out there. But it’s also crazy-making, because you can’t stop comparing. Like So-and-so wasn’t as creative as my last boyfriend. Or So-and-so doesn’t excite me the way this person does.

The question becomes: Are you willing to risk what you have in order to hold out for what either may not exist or, equally important, may not be attainable to you, even if it did exist? It’s nice to have high ideals, but the reality is, you may not be attractive to what you consider the best.

How, then, do you know a relationship is right?

Our culture has this view that you should just know if someone’s right for you. And that when you just know you’ll have no ambivalence or reservations, and you’ll never wonder if you’re truly in love, even if you fight all the time and you break up 17 times the way Rachel and Ross did in Friends or Carrie and Big did in Sex and the City. And so often you’ll hear in fiction or film or TV, or even at people’s weddings, these accounts of “We knew from the very first date, or after two weeks, that we would end up together.”