All have shaped my soul.
In continuing my “Girl Talk” series, let’s talk about soul mates. As you know, I solicited input from women asking them what life advice they received, that they found to be toxic. Some of the women I heard from talked about how toxic the idea of a soul mate had been to them.
I looked it up in the dictionary
soul mate
/ˈsōl ˌmāt/
noun
plural noun: soulmates
1. a person ideally suited to another as a close friend or romantic partner.
“Ideally suited to one another” sounds pretty non-threatening and non-toxic by definition. And yet most people have a much more emotionally charged idea of the soul mate. The soul mate is often thought of as one person out there that is your one true love, your prince charming, “the one god has for you.”
This idea of a soul mate can be a pretty heavy burden. It’s a lot of pressure to think that you have this one shot to find the ONE.
What if you never find them?
What if you miss your opportunity?
How will you know when it’s “the one?”
What if you misjudge it and end up with someone who isn’t “the one?”
One website I read said, “Your soulmate makes you feel entirely whole, healed and intact, like no piece is missing from the puzzle.”
Wait…. what?????
I went through years of therapy to learn that no person can make me feel whole, healed and intact. It was my job to become whole and bring that whole person into the relationship. Two halves don’t make a whole – two wholes make a whole.
As a girl, I was raised on fairy tales and romance novels. I bought into the soul-mate myth and when I was sixteen I met him. Love at first site, intense, passionate. We could finish one another’s sentences, we could finish each other’s jokes, we knew what the other one was thinking without even having to say anything. We married young and were completely confident that we were soul-mates. And maybe we were for that moment in time, as young-love teenagers, and yet we weren’t whole and complete, so the whole thing fell apart. We expected the other one to fill the void, to fulfill the dream of happily ever after, but that’s not how happily ever after works.
Happily ever after isn’t about riding off into the sunset with someone who makes you feel whole, healed and intact, it’s about being with someone who takes responsibility for their own wholeness and healing and shares that journey honestly with you. That journey with someone is messy. It’s filled with beauty and also with conflict, boredom, and irritation. It’s mundane. It’s being OK with the fact that sometimes you can’t stand how much you love them and sometimes you just can’t stand them.
If your idea of a soul mate is this one magical person who will come into your life, sweep you off your feet and fill your every desire, when the day-in, day-out of life rubs the shine off the relationship, and your every desire is not being fulfilled, you might just start thinking you’re with the wrong person. You might start believing that you made a mistake and missed your soul-mate. You might start looking around thinking that your TRUE soul-mate is out there somewhere. And you will miss the beauty of the real-life love that’s right in front of you.
If there are soul-mates, I like the idea that they are simply people that come into our lives and touch our souls in some way.
Friends, encounters, siblings, children, parents, lovers.
I’ve had many soul mates. Some have come into my life and left again. Some have stayed. All have changed me in one way or another. All have shaped my soul.
“When you meet that person. a person. one of your soulmates. let the connection. the relationship. be what it is. it may be five minutes. five hours. five days. five months. five years. a lifetime. five lifetimes. let it manifest itself the way it is meant to be. it has an organic destiny. this way it stays or if it leaves. you will be softer. from having been loved this authentically. souls come into. return. open. and sweep through your life for a myriad of reason. let them be who. and what they are meant to be." -Nayyirah Waheed
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