Who will save your soul?
Watching Sex & the City in an apartment by yourself can be somewhat depressing. Add a cat and its a little more depressing. Add the fact that I'm a guy, and its even more depressing. Fall asleep at 9pm and its full blown Where-did-I-go-wrong kind of depressed the next day.
On that show with "Sex" in the title (which is how I got conned into watching it ... I kept on cause I get addicted to shows so easily ... *cough* The OC), the ladies were discussing soulmates. Now, in belief systems, I am usually aligned somewhere between Carrie and Samantha, but I love Charlotte. This episode for some reason found my cynical Miranda side though. In it, she definitely does not believe in soulmates. I could not agree more.
This particular belief is more out of hope. I do not hope that there is one person out there that will make me truly happy. I do not hope that there is one person that can complete me. I hope there is more than one person. The one person idea scares me!
The odds are stacked against me (do the math, 6 billion people, 3 billion are women, and little ol' me.), so what if I don't find this girl? I wasn't very good at those Where's Waldo books as a kid. I lose my keys &/or wallet on a daily basis. And much like an Alanis Morisette song, when I need a knife, all I can find is a spoon. So what would give me any kind of hope to find that single, solitary person that will make me jum the moon? How am I going to find the ying to my yang? The spoon to my knife? The cap to the toothpaste that is my heart? (never did you think you would hear a metaphor about the heart and toothpaste, did you?)
I won't. Or at least not in the kind of dreamy way presented in cheesy, girly romantic comedies. A friend of mine once told me the premise behind arranged marriages in his culture. They began as a way to teach the people involved how to love. You learned how to love the person you were bound to. You learned how to take the good and the bad from the person. You learned how to make it work. You learned to love someone for who they are. It's scary at first, but its exciting everyday when you learn something new about the person or learn a life lesson together. The climax is not the wedding; the marriage is the climax. Kinda makes the American love match not seem so good.
While I don't think we should abandon the idea of love matching, there is something to take from the idea of that arranged marriage: love for how they are & making it work. That is what I believe in. I think that we date around until we find someone with whom we want to make it work. I think we date until we learn ahow to love someone for who they are & how to make that work. And I am totally great with this idea. We learn the same values, just in a different way. We may still choose to learn our lessons one at a time, date-by-date, girlfriend-by-girlfriend, love-by-love, to reach that marriage pinnacle, where although we still have much to learn, we have new challenges to face. But we still choose to learn those lessons. And that is worth the search.
And maybe I have this all wrong. Maybe I'm more like Miranda than I'd like to admit, cause by the end of the episode she gets a boyfriend and the idea of soulmates doesn't sound so unrealistic. So, maybe if I get a girlfriend it won't sound so far-fetched. But until then, I hold steadfast against the soulmate.
And so goes the life ...
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