Soul Mate

Another post on my journey to 50 - this time, about love.

A while ago I had a conversation with a friend who is in her mid-twenties. She was telling me about the man she had met and fallen in love with. With much sparkle, she described him as her soul mate.  Since this was the second soul mate she had met in last year, I asked her what she meant by soul mate.

“Oh, he’s sooo interesting and smart. We share so much and have such a good time together.  I feel better when I am with him. He’s become my best friend”  Then, using the line from Gerry McGuire, she said, “He completes me.” 

My cynical brain was saying she must be having some great sex. But all I said was, “Wow, I am happy for you.”

Though the term “soul mate” has always made me wince, I could see her point. Her description of this relationship brought me back to one of my old boyfriends, someone I met when I was the same age as my young friend. In thinking about that relationship, I could see why she was seeing “soul mate” in these boys. 

When you’re young, relationships can seem so magical and the people can take on importance that feels so all encompassing - it gives you this thing that is so big, so important, that you question how you ever got along without it. Without them. No wonder you feel like you were incomplete.

But of course you’re not incomplete. And of course, your life is bigger than just this one person. And over time, as the newness of the relationship fades and you spend more and more time together, the person who was idolized as a soul mate could become, well, human.

I started this post and was contemplating this soul mate idea the other day. I walked into the kitchen and there was my husband B. He was suffering from a cold and a case of man-flu*, wearing a bathrobe, holding a bottle of NyQuil.  Maybe it was the NyQuil talking, but he choose that moment to impersonate the cartoon character Fat Albert, saying  “Hey, Hey, Hey” as he left the room.

I thought, “There goes my soul mate.”

When we’re young, it’s easy to see that some shiny new boyfriend is your soul mate. But to me, a soul mate is something that evolves over time. Over the last twenty years, B and I have shared much happiness, some sadness. We have had flush times and times that were frighteningly lean.  We have traveled and we’ve made a home. We had time that was just the two of us, made a baby and now share in the journey of raising that child.

Most of all, we’ve shared the joyful munandeness of every day life. 

Together, we manage (juggle) the logistics of family, of work, of life.  We make meals, enjoy meals. I drop off, he picks up. I create clutter, he moves the clutter. I sleep on the left, he sleeps on the right. I win at Clue, he wins at trivia. I get parking tickets, he pays them. He helps our daughter with math, I help her with “language arts.”  We sing from the same hymnal, laugh at the same jokes. We both find our own ways of being imperfect, and we tolerate imperfection in each other.

And at the center of all this living is love.  It takes love to create a life with someone; it takes loves to transform the mundane routines of each day into something special. And that’s what we give and get from each other - love that gives us strength and courage to go out and be the best person we can be. Love that helps us to experience each day like the miracle it is.

*Man-flu - a condition that seems to only affect men, making every sickness they contract more painful, difficult, and longer than usual. Other symptoms include the need to talk about the sickness at length and the use of non-essential medicine  (see: NyQuill.)