Posted 2:31 PM by Blah blah

Soulmates

I added more thoughts to the RBJ Discussion Boards. Amabelle started a thread about what people thought of the whole idea of soulmates. Here's my view:

I agree with the married folks on this board (Cyn and Scott). And Paul_J, you are an awesome writer.

I think the idea of one and only one person for us is a myth. In regular life, we meet all kinds of people who would have a wonderful chance of satisfying us and being satisfied by us.

It's not a question of "are they the ONE" but of
1) how mature and grounded we are to deal with them, and
2) how hard we are willing to work to make the relationship blossom and last.

I have met many girls where I think, "yes, maybe we have a chance..." Several things between us do click. We are not exactly the right color or shape, perhaps, but we have some clay we can work with. Unfortunately, they tend to be already taken or far away. :p

But I'm not discouraged. In fact it's ENCOURAGING. Knowing you have so many potential choices, knowing that you do not lose the world when you leave your hometown or make a big career change and leave your current "soul candidate." Knowing that you have the skills within you to build a successful relationship wherever you go and knowing you can coax your partner to be his or her best. That's what we should strive to become and that's what will give us security.

I think throwing relationship problems into the category of "well we just aren't meant to be" is a cop-out. For anything to flourish, and not just a relationship, we need to put 90% of our time into unglamorous, routine tasks. Maintenance is not sexy, but that's what lays the foundation to make the remaining 10% of our experience so sweet that we can imagine we have met a "soulmate."

I've often wondered what makes people fall in love. For instance, why do mothers all love their babies? Why do they consider their cheeks and chins the most handsome or beautiful they have ever seen? To us, maybe one baby to another looks the same. But to a mom, she has run the whole show from the beginning. She has been the director, producer, and janitor of her personal stage. She's suffered the agonies of morning sickness and the joys of ultrasound scans. She has put in 9 months of suffering and hard work.

After all of that, how can she help NOT falling in love with her baby? It's like that part of The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry, where he is talking to a garden of stuck-up roses:

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you — the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."

So once we get the superficial stuff out of the way, we settle down to cultivating the garden of our relationship. And with our sweat we infuse each other with our uniqueness and gradually BECOME soulmates.