The Perfect One - Your soulmate.

Can you ever find the perfect one? Your soulmate? 

Lauren Chval, a freelance writer, found her “Mr Right” at 25, and it was only her second boyfriend after she mustered the courage to break off with the first. 

It was a tumultuous and volatile relationship, her first boyfriend. Lauren said that “after years of break-ups and make-ups”, they finally went their separate ways. 

But the second one, her husband, is different from the first. While the first was “controlling but thoughtful, intense in good ways and bad”, her husband was “smart, gentle and kind.”

She knows he is different because she felt he was too good for her. She said she “felt inept and unworthy in the face of his goodness”. 

Some of his qualities are: 

1) “He never called me names or exploited my insecurities in a fight”.

2) “He tended to his family relationships with purpose and unselfishness”.

3) “He has a calmness I cannot fathom”.

4) “He is rarely defensive when I raised problems with the relationship;”

and

5) “With an open mind, he has grown into not just what I needed, but what I wanted.”

She said that “he withheld deeper emotions until later in the game. He was everything (she) needed but nothing like (she) thought (she) wanted.”

“I married the steadiest person I have ever met and embraced our relationship for everything it was instead of everything it was not,” Lauren added.

Lesson? One. Soulmate? Well, is there really someone out there with your name on her or him? 

I like what Lauren said about relationships. “It is tempting to distil relationships into binaries. One person is passionate and thoughtful but bad; another is good and kind but boring. I fear a life of soulless domesticity but have found my marriage, and husband, to be far more complex.”

The truth is, you won’t know how your partner would turn out along the long course of a marital journey. There is no hard and fast rule to hooking up and staying together, forever. 

Opposite does not always attract and like does not always repel. We are not magnets, bound by some magnetic field. We are humans beings, having a say in the circumstances we are in. 

Two persons can hold different values and yet stay together for different reasons, reasons only the heart knows. 

Charles Darwin once wrote this to his wife of 43 years: “I wish you knew how I value you; and what an inexpressible blessing it is to have one whom one can always trust, one always the same, always ready to give comfort, sympathy and the best advice. God bless you, my dear, you are too good for me.”

You must know that Emma and Charles hold different beliefs. She took her nine children to church every Sunday and Charles would go for a quiet stroll around the church instead. He may have aspired to be an Anglican priest but he died an agnostic. He said “I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age." 

Emma however was a devout Christian to the very end. Yet, as a Christian, she helped Charles to edit his books, especially the most controversial of all, the Origin of Species. She changed his awkward sentences and walked him through some passages to firm them up.

She said: “Everything that concerns you concerns me and I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other forever."

Their love survived the death of their children, sickness and pain, and polar opposite religious beliefs. In ordinary circumstances, they would have gone their separate ways long time ago. 

How about “Like” or like and like? Do they repel? Not so, because I know of a couple who runs the Last Resort, Ken and Addy. 

Their love for each other is based on what they have in common. They share the same interest, a mutual goal to be the light and salt to their immediate community, by providing a home for the lost, broken and rejected. You can read about them in the papers. 

My point is that, you can find many similar interests with your proposed life partner, but that does not guarantee a lifetime of bliss. 

Personalities still clash even when they are swimming in the same current or direction. Two peas in the same pod can be two peas that can’t stand each other and find living together suffocating.

Lauren is right, “it is far more complex” and not reducible to binaries. And honestly, I may have written some posts about love, yet I have never really thought about giving any advice to my daughters (9 and 14) about finding their Mr Right. 

I found mine (Miss Right) quite fortuitously when she caught my attention with her long flowing tresses. I knew her mane way before I knew her name (I know, sounds dubious). And the rest is, well, quite a blur as the world around me microscopically dwindled while hers inexplicably magnified. 

Admittedly, ours is not a smooth relationship. But it was nevertheless one that smoothened itself over time because we strive to turn every friction we encounter into a spark of discovery, and deeper understanding. No easy feat, but who says living together is easy? 

So, taking my cue from Lauren, I would tell my daughters this: -

“Dear, marry the steadiest person you ever meet and embrace the relationship for everything it is instead of everything it is not. 

Yes darling, the key is that you start with something good, something that sets the first spark between you and him. 

From there, focus on the spark, fan it, protect and nurture it. Forget about the bonfires elsewhere. Never keep your eyes away from your first passion. Never compare. 

Your love is yours to grow, treasure him. Encourage each other. Support each other. 

Love may be a gift, but in our hands, it becomes a training ground. Never give up learning, discovering, perfecting, even in the toughest of times. Never expect not to be disappointed. Expect instead to be always hopeful. 

And indeed, embrace the relationship for what it is and not what it is not. Because what it is not is nothing, empty. But what it is is a seed in both your hands. It can grow, it can blossom with time. It can bear good fruits, for a love that can last a lifetime.”