THE ILLUSION OF "THE ONE"
Why your search for a soulmate is actually a misplaced search for God, the Kabbalistic mechanics of loneliness, and why you are still single
The Misplaced Hunger
A woman writes to me with a heavy heart: “I have been single for years. I simply cannot be with someone who isn’t precise for my soul. But I am still desperately yearning for ‘The One.’ What am I supposed to learn from being alone for so long?”
When you say you are yearning for “The One,” you need to understand what you are actually saying. “The One” is the Creator.
People are endlessly, agonizingly confused because they are desperately searching for “The One” in the outside world. There is no “One” on the outside. Every individual human being is required to become “One” on the inside. Becoming “One” means that the Male and Female energies inside of you are perfectly unified. Only when that happens on the internal level can it manifest on the external level.
Your yearning is the most natural thing in the universe, because we all originate from the One. Your soul remembers its original, unbroken wholeness, and therefore it refuses to settle for a partial connection. But the tragedy is that people try to find this absolute, Divine wholeness inside an uncorrected, broken human partner. And when that human partner inevitably fails to be God for them, they get divorced.
The Marriage of Male and Female
The Zohar teaches that every true union is a physical manifestation of the unification of the Holy One and the Divine Presence (Shechinah). It is the joining of male and female as two complementary forces that reveal Light.
But if the Male and Female forces inside your own psyche—your power of giving and your power of receiving, your intellect and your emotion—are at war with each other, you will constantly hunt the outside world for what is broken on the inside.
The Divine Soul yearns for adhesion to the Divine Unity. The Animal Soul simply hunts for external emotional fulfillment. When your spiritual yearning is translated into the childish expectation that a romantic partner will provide you with a feeling of absolute perfection, massive confusion is born. Because no human being is “The One.”
Baal HaSulam emphasizes that a human being must align their form with the Upper Unity by repairing their own desires. Only when you become a whole vessel does the external connection become a natural extension of your interiority, rather than a desperate attempt to fill a void.
The Sanctuary of Singleness
The Messianic consciousness (Torat Mashiach) of the final generation reveals the great confusion: we are looking for “One” on the outside instead of becoming “One” on the inside.
To become One means you stop looking for someone to plug the hole in your soul, and start looking for a partner to do the mutual work of revealing the Divine Presence. You have two choices: You can either sit and deepen your internal unification until you are whole, or you can enter a relationship with the absolute, sober knowledge that a partnership is a grueling spiritual workshop, not an automatic cure for your loneliness.
There are no accidents in time. Being single for years is a highly precise workspace.
Before you hunt for a connection on the outside, you must clarify the connection on the inside. Your “loneliness” is actually a period of ripening. It is the time to dismantle your toxic patterns, your expectations, and the idealized Hollywood fantasies that have become a wall blocking you from real connection.
Do not run from the lack; illuminate it. Are the male and female energies inside you speaking to each other? Are you whole even without an external mirror? Does your yearning stem from an abundance that wants to be given, or from a void begging to be filled?
If your internal halves are still separated, your search on the outside will be loaded, demanding, and constantly disappointed. This long period of singleness is a massive gift. There are no distractions. There are no external mirrors pulling you away from the internal work.
The question is not whether you are alone. The question is whether you are using this singleness as a sanctuary or as a desert. When you become One with yourself, the match arrives from a place of Wholeness, not from a place of Need. And when that person arrives, they must understand they are not there to fill you; they are there to walk with you in the work of Unification.
Otherwise, the relationship will just be a war between two empty voids.
ORIYA’S NOTE
We have turned romantic love into an idol, and it is destroying us.
Look at what we do to each other in relationships. We walk around with these massive, gaping, bleeding holes in our souls, and we demand that another human being fill them. We expect our partners to be our therapist, our best friend, our financial savior, and our source of absolute, unconditional Divine love.
We literally ask another human being to be God for us. And when they inevitably fail—because they are just a human being with their own trauma and exhaustion—we resent them, we punish them, and we leave them to go find the “real” One.
The architecture here drops a nuclear bomb on the modern dating market.
“The One” does not exist on a dating app. “The One” is the Creator. Stop outsourcing your spiritual healing to a romantic partner. If you have been single for years, stop acting like you are cursed. The universe has given you a sterile, distraction-free laboratory to fix your own broken vessel.
If you go into a relationship trying to extract electricity to power your dead battery, you will drain the other person dry, and the house will burn down. The only way a relationship survives the pressure of this generation is if both people show up with their own electricity, fully aware that they are not there to “complete” each other. They are there to do the work.
Stop looking for someone to save you. Build your own grid.