Being “lucky in love” has nothing to do with whether you’ve found The One

If we consider our ‘luck’ in love to be based solely on whether or not we’re settled down, we’re missing the point.

ILLUSTRATION BY ABBIE WINTERS

Finding romantic love often comes down to luck, and some are just luckier than others. You need to physically be in the right place at the right time, and that can be hard enough. You also need to find both parties in the right emotional place. Your life stages and goals need to align; the stars, too. Yet “luck in love” isn’t exclusively defined by whether or not you’re in a relationship, and despite popular belief, it has nothing to do with whether you’ve found “the one”.

The trouble is with how society talks about relationships. Movies and stories suggest that meeting someone is the end of the story. That by solving the “who will I end up with” question, we’ve provided insurance for all of life’s other questions. Aside from the obvious point that even the happiest couples break up, you can also find yourself “lucky” in romantic love but unlucky in other types of familial, platonic and self love. Put simply, being in a relationship doesn’t necessarily mean someone has come out the other side on their journey towards peace with oneself.

If we’re talking about ‘ideal scenarios’ and ‘perfect worlds’, the luckiest people would surely be those who’ve experienced at least a few years of solo self-discovery, finding love right before they reach their upper limit of ghosting and unsolicited dick pics. It’s a mystical sweet spot where someone doesn’t feel as though they’ve missed out on dating, neither have they grown resentful of it. If there is a Narnia and you’ve found it, bloody well done.

But you’re not unlucky in love just because you haven’t found a stumpy faun in the back of your wardrobe. There is an equal fortune to be found in being single, and dare I say it, in dating. In fact, it would be easy to assume I’ve had mostly poor luck, based solely on the fact that I haven’t achieved the mega status of finding ‘the one’. The outcome doesn't define the process, nor does it imply the finality of fortune.

This means that for a long time, I didn’t just miss the point, I missed the whole she-bang. I used to take to heart the concerned questions from couples at dinner parties, friends’ insistence upon me performing the comedy of my dating stories (read: ‘failures’), as well as the unprovoked insistence from coupled off folk that I’ll “find someone”.

Being single for most of my 20s has forced me to develop a relationship with dating itself. It’s been liberating at times, rocky at others, and devastating in parts. In the modern age of online dating, I’d argue that any long-term relationship with dating is prone to becoming toxic at times. The difference is that you can’t demand that dating treat you better when it’s being a shit.

In fact, the hardest part about dating is accepting that finding love–or even a fun fling–is completely out of your control. Your success or your lack thereof has very little to do with you at all. And in a world that tells us that marriage is the success story, you can easily lose sight of everything you’ve gained while you’ve been allegedly ‘failing’.

Sure, I could focus on certain facts: I’ve been ghosted, blocked, had relentlessly bad sex, been sent unsolicited dick pics, and had my safety encroached upon more times than I can count. However, through all of this misfortune, I’ve realised what I don’t want, which is by far more important than realising what I do want. What you want will change with you over time, but establishing your boundaries has a timeless reward.

This isn’t the part when I tell you that I gained all of this hindsight because I’ve found love, cracked the dating game, and I’m now looking back and chuckling at my single self with tender affection.

I still haven’t found ‘the one’, if such a trope even exists. I gained insight from suffering heartbreak and hurt and having only myself to pick me up. I became lucky because my ‘bad luck’ forced me to become strong and to search for positives instead of obsessing over negatives. Incidentally, amongst the positives, I’ve dated lots of kind people with great hair, found my g-spot, been treated like a goddess, and seen some beautiful schlongs along the way.

I’ll find love, probably a few more times in this life. Maybe one of them will stick. And maybe some strong couples I admire will divorce. Who knows. That’s the thing about luck, it doesn't stick around just because it arrived. And just as soon as your fortunes can suddenly look up, so too can someone else’s be ripped out from underneath them. It’s why it’s important for us to never believe that anyone ‘deserves’ good luck. Because what would that say about any of us when we’re faced with something truly devastating?

Regardless of whether you’ve found your life partner, you can count on every one of us experiencing a mixture of good and bad luck. You’re just far more likely to experience good luck if you look for where it already exists in your own life.