I went out for lunch with a bunch of people, some of whom are my friends. My horoscope had said that my love life is unstable at the moment (as it usually does), and a female friend of mine asked: "Do you believe that there is one true love for every one?" She is one of the prettiest and sweetest persons I know, but also very gullible and naive. I'm a bit of a skeptic and I knew she expected a short "No I don't, but I don't really know" type of answer. Now, you presumably understand that when a female asks you a question related to love and romance, you should really think about your answer. You don't want to come across as romantically challenged, thus ruining future chances with her and, somewhat less importantly, you don't want her know that you're an unimaginative asshole. But it didn't occur to me to talk my way around it, it didn't occur to me to think ahead, and I didn't consider the fact that she is very sensitive.

First of all, I cannot believe that people actually believe this astrological nonsense. Various tests have shown that people will believe anything you tell them, as long as you can convince them that it is written in the stars. Seriously though, you can't tell me that whatever is written under 'Pisces' applies to 1/12th of the world population. Such a claim is just absurd.

Back to this true love nonsense. Who or what decides who I get? God? Cupid? Suppose that there is some sort of intelligent life form that dictates our love life, why do some people have to travel around the world to find their true love, while others just marry the girl or boy next door? How come some people find their true love at a very young age, and others when they are older, while some end up dying without ever finding their true love? This God or Cupid would appear to be either very incompetent or a romantic bully.

How about the idea that there is one true love for everyone, but you just have to find that person yourself, because there is no God to help you with this? It would be practically impossible to ever find that person. And one must also wonder how random this distribution is, because of young children and the elderly. So, let's say that your true love will never be under age or dying; I'm not an expert in demographics, but let's say that there are two billion people on the planet that fall in the age range of your potential true love. So, the chance that you'll end up with your one true love is one out of two billion. If I'm getting married for the first time, the probability that it is with my true love is: (1 / 2 billion) x 100%. Windows Calculator tells me that there is a 0.00000005% chance that I'm going to marry the one. The odds against are actually greater than that: presumably, you will not travel the world on a quest for love. So you must search locally. In this case, the odds look something like this (I hope I got everything right):
Number of people within age range in your area = X
Number of people within age range world wide = Y

Y - X = Z

Z / X = 1 : A = Odds against your true love being in your area = B

After we've determined B, we can determine the probability that we will find and marry this one true love, considering B. This is where the math ends as far as this article goes, because I don't want to confuse myself (and we haven't considered things like variance yet, which is huge in this case). However, I think I've made my point here. Clearly, I didn't use the math argument to this extend, but I definitely got my point across.

Don't get me wrong though, I really do believe that you can be in a relationship where you just can't live without the other. However, I think it has nothing to do with the idea that there is only one true love for everyone. In other words, I do not think that this feeling is limited to one person. Although I have nothing to back this up: it could be that our (relatively) short life span makes us believe that the one-true-love idea is sensible. But such a claim will only lead to the chicken or the egg causality dilemma.

Then there came an endless amount of "No wonder you're single" and "You must be very lonely, you sad little person" comments. However, I managed to quickly and smoothly change the subject to the bill, which I offered to take care of if everyone would just shut up.