We Might Be Wrong About Our Idea of Soulmates

there isn't just one person for you

Contrary to what most people would think, or argue, even, it is quite freeing to realize, and accept, that there really is no such thing as a soul mate.¹ That is to say, there isn’t just one person who you have to marry, or fall in love with. There could, in fact, be a dozen of them.

The idea of a soulmate wrongly paints love as being something that is handed over to us rather than something we are actively involved in creating. To think that your marriage isn’t working because you didn’t marry your soulmate is nothing more than a clever way to find a scapegoat for your unwillingness to make the marriage work. Yet marriages don’t just work, they are made to work.

We almost always helplessly fall in love. You meet this pretty lady, and after a few days of conversation, you wonder why you didn’t meet them sooner. They become so much a part of your life you can’t imagine them ever not being in your life. Your personalities fit, you love the same things, and your energies match. Well, you’ve found your soulmate. At least you think so.

Or, as is sometimes the case, you meet this person you think you would really want to do life with, but they don’t seem to harbor the same ideas. “You really are a good person,” she seems to say, “but me and you? I’m just not sure.” You think she’s your soulmate, she doesn’t agree.

I believe there’s such a big place for compatibility in marriage that we dare not overlook, yet more often than we men may think, there isn’t just one lady in the whole world who you only can make life work with, and no other. Once again, there could be a dozen. And that’s pretty much the reason why you shouldn’t fight for a woman. If a lady wants nothing to do with you, and after about a year or two she still isn’t bulging, that is too much a signal that you should look elsewhere.²

Marriage, or a romantic relationship for that matter, as one author rightly puts it, is two sinners saying yes to one another. The idea of a perfect person works well for Hallmark romance movies, in real life, however, people are way too human. That’s why I believe that though God is very much able to point out my wife to me, it isn’t something he would just do for the sake of it. In the words of James C. Dobson: God doesn’t perform a routine matchmaking services for his children, he has given us common sense and sober judgment to be used in matters matrimonial.³

Recently, I was drawn to a section of a book shared by an acquaintance of mine. That sometimes we don’t have to make a choice between two wrongs, but rather, two rights. And most times, it has to do with who to marry. To think that it is only one person among the two who is your soulmate is to allow room for a lot of self doubt later on when life with them doesn’t turn out to be as easy as you had expected. Then you find yourself always thinking, “what if I married the other guy?” Maybe if you married your soulmate, it wouldn’t be so hard.

But love is work. Love is a verb first before it is a noun. When the chemistry is gone, can you go on loving in spite of it? Can you hold on in spite how difficult or impossible it feels? Love is a choice we make. It’s us waking up each morning to that face that still has no make up and saying, “yes, you. I choose you.” Love isn’t something that is just handed to us, it’s work we do, and what works has been made to work.

Paul says that marriage is a hindrance to fully serving God, the aim then should be, that if we marry,⁴ we are to seek to make it possible to honor God in every little aspect of the marriage. To love faithfully and patiently as Christ has loved us. C. S. Lewis in the Four Loves reminds us that in all of us there are those aspects of our character that it is impossible to naturally love.

So when she says yes to me, I would really love to know that she isn’t choosing me because I am perfect, or because she believes I am her soulmate. I would love if she could see how, like every human being, I am broken, and still say: “yes, you.”

If you can, you can buy me coffee, or just to say hi

1. The Sacred Search by Gary Thomas

2. I can’t help it but think of Florentino Ariza in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera

3. What Wives Wish their Husbands Knew About Women by James C. Dobson

4. It is if, not when