Wordsmoker

There are no soulmates. I don’t have one and neither do you. I’m no one’s soulmate; you’re no one’s soulmate. If you think you’re already with your soulmate, you aren’t. You’ve found a good specimen with whom you are compatible, but there are others—possibly many others.

Love is complicated enough without being under the illusion that the Cosmos™ have cut a perfect jigsaw counterpart piece for you to lock with. Even if it seemed that you’d found the perfect piece, after some amount of time—three years, ten years, forty years—you’d realize that in actuality you have some jag or gap in your edges, and the fit is not so snug.

For this concept to rise above other superstitions (i.e. shaking crystals at a wart, or logging time in an angels’ chat room), there has to be the belief that a higher power or mystical power is nudging these forlorn spirits towards one another. The sheer volume of failed relationships is proof positive that there is no such thing occurring, or if it is, it’s an inefficient and unreliable system. Even if there were such an overseeing power, why would you trust it?  After all it focuses its energy on romantic love. Why is it not tackling war? Why not crime, mental illness or global warming? Are well-matched couples more likely to feed the starving multitudes?

Speaking of hunger, if you took a poll of the populace of any impoverished nation, how many votes do you think “Perfect Love” would get as the number one priority? “We didn’t bring you any grain, but here are laptops. Why don’t you start E-Harmony accounts? You all must be suffering dearly without matching up on twenty-nine different levels of compatibility. You’d better move quickly before your soulmate dies of a disease because they can’t get medicine or is executed by a rival faction.”

What if your soulmate is living in Bangladesh or Somalia? How are the two of you going to find one another? Isn’t geography often a huge obstacle in this, or does the soulmate deity—who doesn’t give a shit about the welfare of people in either of those places—make sure that you and your perfect partner actually live close to one another?

If you were stranded on an island with a person of a compatible sex (or maybe even not), how long would it be you before you realized that it didn’t matter if they were your perfect, cosmically ordained match? Or even still, how long would it take before you convinced yourself that this person was, in fact, your soulmate? With no suitable replacement for thousands of nautical miles, doesn’t that person become at least as precious as your actual soulmate?

If guns and bullets were soulmates, every gun could only fire one bullet, and by extension, each bullet would have to seek out the only gun from which it could be fired. Although no gun can fire all bullets, and no bullet can be fired from all guns, there are many acceptable counterparts for each. Just like love. If I had a soulmate, she might think that was a profound explanation. Or maybe she would think that this whole screed is idiotic. That’s probably more like it, because I know that I do.