82-Year-Old Gets Harvard Degree

At this point, the newly 'realistic' woman may start speaking in strange tongues and be left to recover on her beautifully made-up bed with fluffy throw cushions (all bought when she still believed in The One, and hence reeking with the micro-stench of eternal hope and endless disappointment). And one of the first things she thinks when she wakes up the next day - hazy, hurting, her shoes still on and a cocktail parasol entangled in her hair - is that she was right: there really is no magical psychosexual webbing of body and soul, no human jigsaw to be completed only by the arrival of that significant other. At which point even the most realistic of women may perk up a little, and think: OK, The One is dead. Bring on 'The Many'. 

Whatever happened to The One? The concept, the dream, the sheer lovely silliness of it all. Women of all ages were always holding out for 'him', often against the odds, but this seems to be going out of fashion. For most women these days it's not about The One, it's about serial relationships - 'The Many', 'The Few' (in extreme cases 'The None at all'). Somewhere along the line, women have lost patience - choosing the pragmatism of low-grade serial monogamy over the fantasy of happy-ever-after. Romance seems barely to come into it.

Instead of two hearts beating as one, we have the grim reality of two salaries needed to pay the bills. Instead of soul mates there is a new concept of decade mates (whereupon you spend your twenties with one partner, your thirties with another, and so on), which should lead to a lot of anxious faces at milestone birthday parties. 'Thanks for my present. But you're so last decade, you're dumped.' Say what you like, but at least The One was for life.

Is this a new cultural crimp? Or just something else to be filed under 'All Men's Fault'? It used to be that men would only settle down with The One when they had exhausted The Many. So maybe it's only fair if women are opting for The Many because they're exhausted waiting for The One. These New Realists may also have seen what happens to those women who actually manage to snag The One. Nobody could be more in love than Jordan, and yet she admits to feeling tortured by the idea of Peter Andre's 'Many'. Then there are other 'One-snaggers' such as Melanie Griffiths, whose efforts to hang on to Antonio Banderas seem only to lead to more misery and plastic surgery. If she gets any more paranoid about losing her looks (and hence him) her eyebrows are going to end up somewhere around her nipples.

You could look at all these women and think: well, maybe The One isn't all he's cracked up to be. Maybe the Two, the Three, the Four are really where it's at. Well, maybe, maybe not. Just as men are nothing but deluded when they spend their whole lives 'holding out for something better' (body of Paris Hilton, mind of Helen Mirren, owns her own pub), it surely can't be a step in the right direction for women to hold out for something worse, something more realistic and boring. Moreover, say what you like about the romantic delusions swirling around The One, but at least it was a hoot pretending.

Indeed, when you think about it, people always seem to have a lot more fun the less realistic and pragmatic they are about love. Nobody's heart ever beat faster because their eyes met across a crowded room, and they thought:

'I could spend a pointless few years with him.' And although most of us will end up with serial partners, only very strange young women sit and daydream about the seven or so men they're going to meet in their lives who will make them so very happy. Ultimately, then, it might be a good idea to keep hold of the silly romantic idea, the necessary myth, of The One - the shadowy figure in the future who gives us hope and helps us retain our sense of humour while grappling and grumbling our way through The Many. Save the realism for death and taxes....