He holds your hand and it’s like time has stopped. Your thoughts are one and the same, your actions in tandem, everything’s just brighter when she’s around. He’s with you for life, she’s there for the long haul. You’ve got your soulmate.
Right?
The technical definition of a soulmate, according to our good friends Merriam and Webster, is a person who is perfectly suited to another in temperament. Wikipedia says it’s a person with whom one has a feeling of deep or natural affinity. But if you break down the world “soulmate” into its two root words – soul mate – it implies that a true soulmate is way more than that either of those descriptions: it’s a person whose soul intertwines with ours to create something new, something that moves us forward. Something that propels us into an enhanced, next-level incarnation of ourselves.
Why is it, then, that when we think about soul mates, we focus on the romantic ones, and we focus on The One? Is this way of thinking outdated, is it displaced energy? Are we blinding ourselves to what’s right in front of us, or what could be if we tilted our focus to adjust to a new angle?
Soulmates are not just the people we kiss goodnight every night ’til death do us part – they can be anyone, anywhere. A soul mate can be a forever presence or come in and out of your life in the blink of an eye. What makes a soul mate a soulmate is that you two were drawn together for a certain reason, and both are now one step closer to your truest, best self because of the other’s presence.
Soulmates don’t change who you are per se; they open you up to parts of yourself you might have never seen otherwise. They don’t remodel your house, they open the locked doors. They don’t build you a new staircase, they just help you climb it.
Soulmates can be lovers or they can be friends. Soulmates can be family, even. The type of soulmate isn’t important – it’s the fact that you have one that is special. Because soulmates don’t come around often, and we’d be silly to confine them to a certain type of person. Two soulmates embody a soul connection, a soul love that transcends gender or relation. The people who “don’t believe” in soulmates might just be misguided, looking in the completely wrong direction. Soulmates are out there. But it’s not up to us to decide the form in which they arrive at our doorstep.
Soulmates are those people you connect with in an instant, those folks you see and think, I know you. But the thing is, you’ve never even talked, you’ve never even met. There is just something recognizable right off the bat. That’s what a soul mate does: they make this harried unpredictable world a familiar place to belong.
You probably already have at least a few soulmates already, even if you’re not coupled up. Who lights you up from the inside out, but also challenges you to forge ahead into your fullest potential? Who do you want to give selflessly to, without question, without condition, because there’s this inexplicable knowing that this is where you are meant to be? Who ignites your most necessary growing pains and, maybe unknowingly, helps you conquer them? You might not think exactly the same way or like exactly the same things, but that is the beauty of soulmates: they enhance and compliment you, instead of mirroring and completing you.
Whether it’s Valentine’s Day or just a normal day in the life, let’s expand our scope and celebrate all the soul mates that enter our lives. Let’s redefine “the soulmate” for ourselves – because whether they’re here for a short season or a lifetime, we are blessed beyond measure merely to have them around.
