Soulmate

The term soulmate is frequently misused because most people either ignore or misconstrue the notion of the soul; their form of love is corporeal, not spiritual, meaning that their feelings of attachment toward another is inextricably linked to aspects of their physical being. If you fell in love with someone you were convinced was your soulmate, married them, but suddenly their soul was transported into a completely different body, would you love them in the same way? 

I will be the first to admit to this mistake, construing multiple people I’ve fallen in love with in the past as my soulmate, despite not knowing anything about their soul—the very essence of their being, all the stories that have shaped their consciousness, all the minute foibles and idiosyncrasies all the fears and dreams that reside within them, all the things that make them who they are. Had I not been so excessively infatuated—enamored by the grace of their body language, by how apparently adorable they seemed, by  how my heart felt when I caught a glimpse of their smile—there would likely be no semblance of emotional connection in the first place. 

But this subconscious bias toward physical appearance is merely an extension of the normative modes of judgment we use to navigate nearly any social interaction. In much the same way as we do with romantic partners, we just as easily make baseless assumptions about pretty much anyone that we come across in life. What sorts of conclusions do we draw about a person’s character if they’re morbidly obese or underweight, if they’re much shorter or taller than average, if they dress poorly, if they speak with an accent or have bad pronunciation, if they walk with an odd gait, if they’re physically or mentally handicapped, or if they have a certain skin color? Or maybe they just have strange idiosyncrasies that are completely out of their control? 

We’re far more likely to get a job, get into a relationship, and open ourselves up to far more opportunities if we’re conventionally attractive and if we don’t deviate too far from the standards of what is deemed normal. Not because it definitively proves anything about our actual job performance, our ability to love, our character, and who we are, but it proves something about our desire to fit in, to conform, and to do what we’re told. 

Rationally, it makes completely no sense to judge someone’s worth or someone’s relevance to our lives by their physical traits. But if you asked most people if they judge others in this way, very few would admit to doing so, perhaps out of self-delusion, perhaps out of an ever-growing progressive cultural battle against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Much like the notion of unconditional love, since I don’t believe it will ever be possible to uproot this subconscious bias (to an extent, I believe that it’s potentially even dehumanizing to do so), the best we can do is create a kind of cultural awareness of it; we must be constantly conscious of it in ourselves and in others in every interaction we share, especially those that determine the fate of others’ lives. 

It is perhaps the greatest unspoken injustice built into the very nature of our being. At the same time that we almost unanimously internalize the validity of the basic human right of equality of opportunity—when we ostensibly recognize the worth and significance of a human soul beyond what we can physically perceive—we’ve likely simultaneously formed thousands of ill-informed, irrational subconscious judgments for all the people that we’ve encountered thus far in life. For everyone that we didn’t take the time to get to know, we were probably wrong about all of them. 

This is all a long way to say—let’s not bastardize or banalize the notion of a soulmate; we need to recognize that this form of love isn’t something commonplace, something we perceive on a whim, or an emotion that just comes and goes. While I suppose the concept of human love stretching beyond the physical realm can exist, coming to any solid conclusions is nearly impossible, as it is likely beyond our comprehension of the metaphysical. When we’re so predisposed to weigh our perceptions of the physical world over the elusive, almost imperceptible concept of a soul, declaring that someone is our soulmate is to take an extreme leap of faith for ourselves, let alone for the other person involved.