Can you be with ONE person for the rest of your life?

Can you be with one person for the rest of your life?

This was the question posed to me by the guy I was dating for the past four months, as he was contemplating whether or not to agree to commit to a man he'd recently started dating.

"Time is ticking on, so I'm not going to date guys forever," he continued. "But is this really going to be the one person I'm going to be with forever more?"

He seemed confused. Sure, he'd done his fair share of dating. And yes, he was pretty certain that he was in love. But, still, that question niggled at the back of his mind. "Is it possible to think like that these days?" he asked me. "I mean, do you believe you could do that?"

I wanted to scream:

"Yes! Of course I do!"

But realistically, I didn't have the answer. Nevertheless, his musings got me thinking: can modern-day singletons really see themselves settling down with just one person for the rest of their lives? Or has the transient dating scene made it impossible for any of us to contemplate such a thought?

"Absolutely not," said another friend of mine James, when I posed the same question to him over coffee a few days later. James’s reckons that if he had never moved to Kuala Lumpur City, he would have been married at 23 with two kids in tow by now.

"I would have never known anything different. So would I have been as happy? probably yes."

But instead, he says that with the abundance of choice available to him and ripe for the picking (for the record he's in his late 30s with sparking sea-green eyes and a hot-to-trot body), it makes it all the more difficult for him to pick just one. I've seen the boy flock around him, and I kind of know what he means.

"The problem is that there are too many ways out these days," he says. "And where I live now, there is always someone else around the corner. Or so it seems."

My friend Jake, who has a penchant for dating a number of men at once with the aim of "keeping his options open", concurs.

"I always have this mentality that the grass is greener. So nothing is concrete any more. You date, you live together, you might even settle-down together. But then someone else comes along and you think, 'Am I making the right choice?' The answer is often sadly a 'no'."

When I asked my single fortysomething mate Steve, he said that the fact there was so much choice made it all the more difficult to make a decision.

"That's why player-types will never become settle," he told me. "Too much choice makes it impossible for them to ever contemplate choosing just one."

"Are you a player?" I asked him.

"No. But that doesn't make the decision any easier for me either."

Author Barry Schwartz discusses this concept brilliantly in his book, The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less. He writes that, while the freedom of choice we have nowadays is critical to our well-being, freedom and autonomy, nonetheless "we don't seem to be benefiting from it psychologically". Instead, he says that more choice only leads to depression and feelings of loneliness.

True, in the midst of the current non-commital sexual zeitgeist, we now come face-to-face with the fact that fewer people are settling down, there are higher divorce rates and the median marriage age has been significantly delayed.

But where does it leave those who might want to settle down? Do we simply go into it with the expectation that things will come to an end once they've run their course? Is "happily ever after" now a thing of the past?

For Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, unfortunately, the answer seems to be yes. With their 25-year marriage suddenly kaput, it seems they really did go into it with the best intentions.

In fact, just a few years ago, Shriver told the media: "We are still engaged with each other, hot for each other, into each other. There hasn't been a moment when I have been bored. I have worked and worked on my marriage, and it has paid off."

But now? "Forever" is just no longer a certainty.

When I carried out an unofficial poll on the subject, the answers were split right down the middle. Fifty per cent said it was unrealistic to envision yourself with one person for the rest of your life and that it would never work; the other 50 per cent believed it could indeed happen.

Sir Paul McCartney has recently proposed for the third time – this time to millionairess Nancy Shevell - even though his previous wife took $50 million from him.

He says this time around it is indeed "real love", and that he won't be asking his new fiancee to sign a prenup. Third time lucky perhaps? Only time will tell …

What do you think? Can you imagine yourself being with one person for the rest of your life?

As for me here:

I met Angus when I was 29 and thought at that time I was settle. This is the person I'd be sitting on the verandah with, chinking a glass of wine and dribbling on my shirt as we both passed into the forever after holding hands.

Well, 11 years from that sashay down, the partnership succumbed to both our inability to keep the love alive.

Yep, I went off and had my mid-life crisis with the Green Eye William and the fabric of my partner and I's friendship was torn irrevocably.

I thought at the time that the Green Eye William would be my new companion on the verandah -- alas, after six months together it was not to be.

Since then I've met a couple of wonderful men that I got close to thinking that verandah scenario with. But... nope.

I still hold on to the romantic notion of that late summer afternoon, a glass of a decent champagne, holding hands and both of us looking into our watery looking eyes and feeling that moment when our spirits floated into the aether entwined for ever more.

So the concept of staying with someone for the rest of my life is real for me.

But finding someone else that will stay the distance that I don't annoy to death and does not annoy me to my grave is not as easy as it may seem.

And as we get older and more determined in what we want as well as more relaxed about what we tolerate... It's crazy out there.

My advice... live the best you can with the one you are with. If it goes pear shaped... start again!

Till then, catch you here soon