Soul Mate = Singlehood

I can't take credit for this idea, but I wanted to pass it along. It really spoke to me.

My mom cut the article out of O Magazine for me nearly 3 years ago and sent it to me while I was living in the big city. (She does that a lot, and it's kind of a running joke between the two of us... she always has a stack of papers to share only she's forgotten exactly why she wanted to share them!)

I'm really glad she sent this one because it totally changed my outlook on the quest for "The One." After reading this, I realized my efforts had more than likely been counterproductive.

So please read this and pass it along to the favorite "single" in your life. It just might change their life, too.

Soul Mates: A Primer
Valerie Frankel; O, The Oprah Magazine; April 1, 2002

Does your perfect match exist? What if he lives in Greenland? What if there's more than one? Valerie Frankel aims some soul-searching questions at religious leaders, metaphysicians, and academics.

TEN YEARS AGO I MET MY SOUL MATE. HE WAS EASY to recognize on a crowded planet of six billion. It wasn't an electric look in his eyes, or a sudden whoosh of magic when we touched. Rather, Glenn made me laugh. We had chemistry, passion, compatibility a sense of destiny. We conducted our marriage, and the parenting of our two daughters, with smug certainty. We crowed about it late at night in bed, how we could handle anything life might throw at us.

Turned out, life threw death at us. In November 2000 he died of lung cancer at 34. I was left in every way, alone and not right. My revised destiny: a long, lonely future. There couldn't be another One True Love. That would make Two. No one ever says, "He's the Two, I just know it." Friends and family assured me that I'd find love again. I doubted it. Even if I could eke out sexinduced emotion for a new man, it couldn't compare. My husband-my soul mate-had been my other half. No one else could get that close.

FOR ME, SOUL MATE-ISM HAS been both an extra gift and a belief. For the majority of singles, it's a requirement. An Internet search for the phrase yields dozens of dating Web sites promising to deliver a soul mate for a $25-a-month registration fee. Of the 1,003 subjects in Rutgers University's 2001 National Marriage Project survey, 94 percent of the 20-to-29-year-old respondents agreed that "when you marry you want your spouse to be your soul mate, first and foremost." Eightyeight percent of the single pollees in that age group are convinced that "there is a special person, a soul mate, waiting for you somewhere out there." But the National Marriage Project estimates that at least 15 percent of current young adults will never marry. Their soul mate search will be futile."

I see a connection between seeking a soul mate and lifelong singlehood," says David Popenoe, PhD, professor of sociology at Rutgers University and codirector of the National Marriage Project. Popenoe adopted the phrase soul mates in his survey because it came up again and again in focus groups. "It means a person who is exactly right for you, with whom you have perfect chemistry," he says. "The relationship is easy, it feels meant to be. In theory, the concept is terrific. These are comforting thoughts in a difficult marital period in history. But searching and believing in a soul mate is not helpful. It's dysfunctional. It compounds loneliness. Anyone has hundreds of potential marriage partners. It's a terrible idea to look for a perfect match. He does not exist."

"I agree," says Mary T. Browne, a psychic, author of The Power of Karma, and one of the friends who helped me in the dark hours. "The concept of a soul mate implies that you can't achieve perfection without uniting with another person. But each of us is whole in and of herself. What people really want is a loving, harmonious, passionate relationship. There are many people at this time on earth that you can have a meaningful connection with." But as meaningful as what I'd lost? "We make ourselves unhappy by believing in a one true soul mate who does not exist," she says.

"Does not exist," say both the sociologist and the psychic. But maybe soul mate-ism has validity in a religious context. Enter the priest and the rabbi (a setup in need of a punch line: "A psychic, a sociologist, a priest, and a rabbi walked into a bar..."). "The teaching of the Catholic Church has always been of a complete holy marital union," says Father Charles Kraus of St. Charles Borromeo Church in Brooklyn. "The relationship develops in God's presence, transmitting total trust, committing to each other in life, and continuing the abiding love of God and each other in heaven." God has no hand in helping people find each other (so much for fate or destiny), but one can turn to God for guidance and strength to maintain or reinforce the commitment. The classic elements of the union of souls--instant chemistry grand passion--don't have anything to do with love of God. Ergo, they don't play with Father Kraus.

NOR DO THEY WITH RABBI Miriam Ancis of HavuratShalom synagogue in Brooklyn. "Jews have a word--b'shert--that means 'meant to be,'" she says. "But it's used only in hindsight. If a marriage works out, everyone says it was b'shert. That's the extent of romantic destiny in Judaism. A marriage is holy and based on shared values, but it's not a cosmic union of long-searching souls. It's a practical arrangement, and the couple is responsible for making it work, but that doesn't always happen. In fact, Judaism was one of the first religions to acknowledge and permit divorce." No one says a divorce is b'shert. "After a split, people say 'That's too bad.' B'shert is for happy outcomes."

And what of my situation? My marriage was b'shert, and I readily attached cosmic glitter to it. I want to believe that Glenn and I were meant to be--and, for that matter, that he was meant to cease to be. Otherwise I'd get lost in a downward spiral of why. (Why are my children fatherless? Why did a nonsmoker get lung cancer? etc.) Some people die young. And those who are left (alone, not right) have to continue, soul mate-less.

About nine months after Glenn died, a friend gave me Nancy Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love. On a romantic quest, the heroine goes from one intense relationship to the next until both she and her last, best love die during World War II. At the end the narrator--the heroine's cousin--says to her mother, "I think she would have been happy with Fabrice. He was the great love of her life, you know." The mother says, "One always thinks that. Every every time." The line is meant to be cynical. But, coming out of the worst of my sadness, I fell in love with the notion that any passionate relationship, simply because it was current, would seem like the best one yet. I fixated on the possibility that my next relationship with just a man--he could never he a cosmic soul mate--didn't have to be a crushing disappointment. The bestness would be an illusion. But it would also be pretty.

And so it is. Several months ago I met a man. Steve makes me laugh. We have chemistry, passion, compatibility. I'm in love again. It's sweet, warm, and simple as pie. In many ways he's better suited to me than Glenn (in others, he's not). This time, though, I'm not smug. The person I've become is grateful for every blessing, thankful for any small happiness. I can't (won't) say, "He's the Two, I just know it!" It hardly matters if he's the Two, the Other One, the Current One, One More, One Less, or One of Hundreds. There's a huge relief, actually, in separating my relationship from destiny Who needs that kind of pressure? Soul mates probably don't exist. Steve definitely does. I'll take him, imperfectly for as long as it lasts. And I'll feel lucky. Every, every time.

"Writing this story was a richly satisfying experience for me, and I hope reading it will help others," says Valerie Frankel, who debunks the myth that there is only one perfect partner for each of us in "Soul Mates: A Primer" (page 75). "It's a really beautiful concept, but that's where you have to start and stop if you want to be happy." Frankel, the author of the upcoming book The Accidental Virgin (Morrow/Avon), lives in Brooklyn with her two daughters, Maggie, 6, and Lucy, 3.