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On Soul Mates
Whether or not there was one fated for me, in the final accounting there will be only one.
There is so much tangled up in our conception of soul mates. To believe in soul mates seems to be a victory of heart over mind, as it is difficult to rationally conceive of one existing, among billions, who is an exact match and that we are somehow to find. It carries with it an implication of monogamy, which like any human ideal exists in truest form only on some imagined, platonic plane, but is fraught with messiness and partiality in all real-world manifestations. Yet, there is something to this silly pipe dream of love.
We cross the paths of thousands and thousands of people in this life, and still you find one who stands above all the rest. Have you never met a person who exists as if by design? I do not mean that they are perfect in every way. Look at the best art, and you will not find perfect characters and forms; you find a mirror of life. It is the depth of complexity, the texture of soul, the fullness of existence — only art that captures this is true art. This piece of living art was designed for us in such a way that their worst imperfections are only happy reaffirmations, proving that their greatest qualities are indeed real, and can be real, because they have been compensated for and given context in the full gamut of their being.
