J: Would you?

This weekend I rented TiMER a movie recommended by a married friend as one that I'd really identify with and enjoy. She was right!

I loved the concept: a new technology has emerged that allows you to know the exact moment that you will meet your true love and due to a timer that is implanted in your arm you can watch the count down and will be notified by a beep-beep-beep of the moment that the magical eye contact happens (just in case you don't happen to notice it on your own).

What a fabulous thing, right?

Well…with such a great gift there are always challenges...

For one thing, your timer doesn’t start counting down until your soul mate also has a timer implanted. So if you have a timer but it's blank, every timer-less guy just might be “the one”. But what if he has a moral objection to the whole idea? Do you force the issue? And if he finally agrees to get a timer of his own and you take him in and your timer stays blank but his shows a countdown…what then?

What if your “zero-out” date is years and years in the future? How do you spend those years of waiting? If you’re 34 and know you have another 10 years of wait do you have a child on your own, knowing that you’ll be too old to have one when he finally shows up? Or do you spend the years playing around…having meaningless worthless flings with other guys who are still counting down and want to sow their wild oats before they meet their true love and have to settle down?

What if you get your timer at 16 (legally, the earliest possible age for timer implantation) at your parent’s insistence, only to discover that the wait time is just days away? As a 16 year old, how are you mature enough to handle the knowledge that the girl next door is the only one you’ll ever know?

And what if you truly fall in love with someone with a different zero-out than yours? Do you still go into the relationship, knowing that it’s doomed to eventually fail when he meets the real love of his life?

Okay, obviously, this was a movie and movies aren’t real life. But it begs the question…if the technology was available to you today, would you get a timer of you own?

As a single gal it seems like it would be a relief to know that there was actually someone out there and that it's just a matter of time before you meet and live happily ever after.

But would the value of knowing “when” outweigh the price of knowing “when”?