No such thing as a “soulmate”.
You find someone “good enough” and then you make it work.
Some times even when they aren’t good enough.
Theoretically, there is a “best fit” person on the planet at any one time for everyone. Finding that person is infinitely small and that “perfect” fit person changes over time.
One could call that person a soul mate. Just my 2 cents.
I don’t believe in the concept of a soulmate. But that being said, the relationship my wife and I have is the strongest evidence I’ve ever experienced for that very concept.
We’ve been married now 25 years and we received the greatest anniversary gift on our 25th anniversary. Surgeons at University of Kentucky saved my life and gave us what hopefully will be many more years together.
I can’t emphasize this enough. We simply don’t fight. Nobody in this life has made me feel as loved as my wife does. And I like to think that nobody makes her feel as loved as I do. I have a phrase for her that she loves but some of you might be creeped out by, but I stand by it: she is my mother, my sister, my daughter, my best friend, my lover, my wife.
When I was in the hospital for my open heart surgery, she slept in that hospital room for one month. She never complained, and actually made a lot of friends at the hospital. And she spent a lot of time taking midnight walks. But really, that little story only scratches the surface.
And one of the reasons I can appreciate it so much is because it came right after a 20 year relationship that was a constant struggle to get along. We were trying, at least I was, and at the end of the day she just wasn’t having it and thought she’d better be better off single. And the comical part? When she finally decided she was going through with a divorce, I prayed to God to free me from my love of her and a week later I noticed that I was completely numb to her. Two weeks later I went to my 25-year class reunion and that’s where I met my current wife.
But it might be that it was strengthened by the courtship. Since she lived in South Dakota and our class reunion was in Seattle, where I live, our courtship began with a heartfelt letter from me to her followed by 850 emails and $3,500 in long distance calls. In other words, our courtship was not dating. It was getting to know each other up one side and down the other. And we both made a lot of confessions to each other in all that correspondence.
We’re both 69 now and one of the fascinating things about our life that I never saw coming was there are a lot of fatherless children around here as well as children without grandparents. The number of children for whom my wife and I have become surrogate grandparents at the request of the parents is just crazy. My wife is the best grandmother I’ve ever seen and she’s getting flooded with grandchildren and she loves every one of them. And of course, that is include our own seven grandchildren. They’re scattered all over the country. Thank God for facetime!
Years ago I read a book, Nectar in a Sieve, which was set in India in the transition period of colonialism to independence. The protagonist an Indian female, was given away in an arranged marriage and made the observation that (I paraphrase) in the west people fall in love and get married, and in the east, people get married and fall in love.
Yep. There is no perfect spouse and too many people grow old jumping from partner to partner trying to find one. Articles like this don’t help, they only feed dissatisfaction with false expectations.
Also, none of us is perfect. If you were to find the “perfect” person, at least one of two things is going to happen. One, you will find that they have a lot of choices, and you are not their first. Two, you are going to be very disappointed when their imperfections manifest.