October 9, 2002

I WENT TO the San Francisco Public Library to look for the One.

Not in the stacks, where some wistful swain might have been lost in a dusky tome, memorizing sonnets, but in Koret Auditorium, which, on Sept. 18, at the improbable witching hour of 5:45, promised to become a designated love zone. –The theater was packed – every seat filled, tender hearts sitting on the floor in the aisles, standing up in the back. It was a global warming-worthy evening, the kind of balmy night when nauseatingly in-love couples stroll the streets hand in hand, misty-eyed, the mere sight of them torturing everyone they pass.

But we were safe inside at the Grotto Night – the fifth in a quarterly series featuring themed readings, film, storytelling, and theater – pondering that burning question: Is there any such thing as the One? You know: the one-and-only paramour who emerges from a cast of billions to make you realize (cue: quickening pulse) that All the Clichés Are True.

I had expected to find a ragtag smattering of disgusted polyamorists protesting outside this love-in, but there wasn't a peep of "Why stop at just one?" placard-waving dissent. The nonmonogamous were probably all over at Crissy Field, feeding one another strawberries and processing about boundary issues. Bliss.

The evening began with a short film by J.D. Beltran and Po Bronson called "The One?" which opens with a montage of couples who have been married forever and still seem to like being in the same room with each other.

Apparently, the fact that you've found someone to spend practically your whole, fricking life with doesn't necessarily mean you believe in the One. A Honolulu woman who's been married for 59 years says she doesn't buy it. An aging Ken-and-Barbie couple from Lafayette, who have been together for 41 years, say neither of them believes in it either. But other aging lovers still recall the moment they Just Knew they had met the One. "It was like I was in a well...," one graying Romeo solemnly recounts, sounding like he's describing an alien abduction.

That's just the wonder of the great limbic lobe, Dr. Thomas Lewis explains in the film. He's an assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco and coauthor of A General Theory of Love. (You just knew that evolutionary biology would have something to say about this, didn't you?) The limbic lobe is the center of the emotions, the part of the brain that lets you divine the internal state of your beloved by gazing into his or her eyes. It's a faculty that mammals – who bear live young that require nurturing in order to survive – have but reptiles lack. The conviction that there is one special person out there just for you may stem from an infant's predilection to be bonded to a single primary caregiver. And, when you meet that special someone, you're simply encountering a compatible limbic system. Romantic, huh?

If you secretly long for a fairy-tale romance, you might want to read your fairy tales again, suggested Catherine Orenstein, author of Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, reading from her work on that wayward miss. Turns out that many of those fairy tales were originally horror stories. In one early version of "Sleeping Beauty" our heroine ends up being eaten by her mother-in-law, an ogress. Keep your kisses to yourself, prince, thanks.

"What if you're born with the One?" Noah Hawley asked, telling the story of himself and his identical twin brother. Split from the same egg, born 10 minutes apart, the brothers spent 26 years together, attending the same college, moving to New York together, and playing in the same bands, until Noah moved away to the West Coast. "On the day I left, my brother proposed to his girlfriend, so he replaced me," Hawley said.

And what happens if you believe in the One, but your one true love is forever missing in action? Performing a scene from Tanya Shaffer's forthcoming play Baby Taj: A Monument to Love, Shaffer and Tara Blau acted out biological-clock brinkmanship. As one woman is about to inseminate her best friend with a turkey baster of frozen sperm, the 35-year-old wanna-be mom finds that she can't go through with it. She really wants a baby, but does she want one like this? She's just not ready to give up the dream of meeting her one and only and having a love child with him. If she goes through with the artificial insemination, will she always wonder, "What if I'd held out for another day or month or year?" Her darkest fear: since she hasn't found her dream Romeo, perhaps she's just swapped one perfect love delusion for another. Maybe she just wants the baby as a substitute, to provide another kind of perfect love.

But there was nothing in all this musing about the One that bewitched the audience as much as "Tales of Mere Existence," by Lev Yilmaz. Demented, self-obsessed, and insecure, his animations about jealousy and lust and why beautiful people are boring had people choking down their laughter so they wouldn't miss the next line. (See for yourself at www.ingredientx.com.)