Photo by Flickr user Eduardo Carrasco. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In the course of pondering political blogger Andrew Sullivan's experience of psilocybin mushroom hallucinations as evidence of spiritual reality, fellow political blogger Kevin Drum asks what might seem to be an unrelated question but, I promise, really, really isn't.

What do you think of those reality TV shows like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, where some handsome guy or gal sweeps through a field of equally handsome contenders week by week until they're left at the end with their one true love? As near as I can tell, most people who watch these shows think that it shows something about the power of romance. But I have a different takeaway: if you can take 25 random people and reliably make your bachelor/bachelorette fall in love with one of them every single time, then it really means there's not much to romance at all, doesn't it? A few weeks of time and a modest selection of potential mates will do it every time. Sorta sucks all the mystery out of it.

Source: Kevin Drum

The real context for Drum is the durability of confirmation bias rather than mushroom-induced spirituality or romance. But his question about romance is actually pretty interesting. Because it confirms my possibly biased belief that romance is made not found.

I wrote a post about the "one in a million" conceit about finding love. Reading over it I see it was personal beyond belief -- a seemingly dry discourse about grief and expectation, loneliness and miracles, and the intense irony of something that was happening literally across the street at the moment of my despair-fueled question "is it true?"

The post is called About Perfection.

Here's the "dry" part from that post

If someone does have to be one in a million… well, at the time that meant there were still roughly five people in my area code who were perfect for me. And if someone was going to be perfect for me she was probably close to my age, she was probably interested in the things I was interested in, probably had a background similar to mine… and probably lived somewhere nearby. Realizing there might be five one-in-a-million people living close enough that I might somehow meet them… well it didn’t exactly cheer me up but it broke that cycle big time.

But is it true? Is one in a million really the magic ratio?

I don’t think so. To be honest I think it’s lower. A lot lower. Mightent it be closer to one in 100,000? How about one in 50,000?

I’d already met a number of tremendously wonderful people. Yet I doubt I’d met even 50,000 people in my life.

But say I had. I’d certainly met dozens of people I felt that, under the right circumstances, I could have a lasting relationship with. So that magic number was even lower. I decided it was closer to one in a thousand, and to this day I think that’s about right.

That was the part I was looking for when I first read Drum's post. And the main thing I wanted to say when I started looking for my old post was that Drum's insight probably pushes my lower bound even further.

But I just have to add that the most important part... the one that brings tears back to my eyes... comes almost at the end.

It was a one in a million coincidence.

If we’d each met four years earlier, when we needed each other the most, in our lost and lonely apartments across the street… I’m not sure it would have worked.

Instead we met when we were open, available, but not lost, not sad, not really even lonely.

15 years later, two children later, ten thousand kisses and just maybe that many disagreements, through all manner of sicknesses and healths, of betters and worses, we’re still not perfect for each other…

But she’s one in a million for me

And if my math is a little off it doesn’t really matter because we weren’t really counting.

Perfection, as the girl in Lisa’s story didn’t understand, isn’t found. It’s made.

There are only two things I'd change about that post. The trivial one is that a shift in blogging platforms erased the names of all those who left sweet comments. The other one, just the correction of one out of date number really, isn't trivial at all. If I were rewriting the post I'd have to change the fifteen in "15 years later..." to twenty.

The main point though? The one Drum hints at and I pondered all those years ago? It's still true.

Geez, I don't usually say very nice things about my own writing, but... since I'm not sure I've ever written anything else like it I'm going to link to it again! About Perfection, from February 2006.