Just curious.... How did you meet your spouce/Significant other? How did you know that he/she was the "one"? Was it easy or difficult to figure out?

Wish I could post my story here, but I haven't actually found him yet :-) And if I have, I wasn't paying attention...

He snuck up on me.

We met when I was a freelance web designer and worked on his company's website.

How did I know he was "the one"? I'm not sure I believe in "the one", but I knew I could spend my life with him because he never felt like a stranger.

Also, we never ran out of things to talk about, but never needed to talk....

I guess I'm saying it's just comfortable and I can't imagine being with anyone different.

... I knew I could spend my life with him because he never felt like a stranger... Also, we never ran out of things to talk about, but never needed to talk.... Exactly! Very well put.

Ditto me and my (current) hub. We met in the late 80s online, via a chat board a lot more primitive than this one, long before there was a public Internet. (Still kick myself for not writing a book about what cyber-dating was like in the real old days...)

As for the "how do you know?" part that is the age old question, with as many answers as couples, I'll bet. Everyone has their own set of what they find more and less important. In my own case, another way I have put it is that "we look at the world through similar eyes." It's not that we agree on everything, far from it, but that at least we start from a similar set of perceptions about how things operate and what matters most to evaluate.

One clue I suppose is that we didn't need reams of email to connect. After getting the gist of the bios, we went straight to phone and then to 3D and never did much with each other online after that, actually. We'd both been married before which helps also in terms of understanding yourself and what works better and worse in your own relationships. But that essential comfort with each other, the easygoing freedom to speak your mind all the time and have the other get it, those were the biggest clues for me.

If I had to put a term to it, I might call it "deep symbiosis." There's a big shared set of core values and lifestyle preferences, spiced up with a lot of differences, but the differences are mostly complimentary, a balancing.

Now we're approaching our 15th anniversary, and he's still the first choice of people I'd spend my spare time with... :)

My wife and I started out as housemates. We were both seeing other people at the time, but we ended up together within a few weeks.

With my wife, I felt a kind of calm serenity around her that I'd never felt with anyone else. It's kind of like how I've always felt better with the ocean in sight: like knowing I have one safe direction to turn my back allows me to face the rest of the world. I didn't know about ADHD at the time, but I guess from an ADHD perspective, I was looking for an external calm/focus because my mind is always in chaos. Basically, she says she married me for my passion, or spark, or ambition, or whatever you want to call it.

I'm not sure how I knew she was the woman for me. It just hit me one day. I know I felt something when I first saw her. It wasn't lust exactly, but I could only categorize it as love in retrospect. She tells me that when she first met me she thought, "I could marry this man."

Our values differ pretty widely in a number of areas, but we live with, or at least around, each other's values fairly well.