The Danger of Soul Mates

When I started spending time with Joe in college, it didn't take long for me form a deep friendship and connection with him. He was tall, athletic, and blonde, played the guitar, took the time to understand and know me, and most importantly shared my depth of faith. We had awesomely funny conversations about squirrels and boogers, and awkwardly danced around our feelings for each other without ever defining them or daring to explore them.

As a crush developed, I tried to push aside those emotions as I did with all crushes but to no avail. I think I was several months ahead of him emotionally and went through a time where I had to pull away. Both of us during that year of friendship had dreams of our wedding to each other. It took us nearly a year and much drama to begin dating, but after a long walk through campus in the snow, almost instantly we knew we were in love and would likely get married. The love was so natural and easy, and Joe never left one speck of doubt in my mind whether or not he would fight for us.

It was the picture of two soul mates coming together, but neither of us believes in the idea of soul mates. Either of us could have met someone else along the way and fallen head over heels. The match may have not been natural and easy, or it could have been profoundly more exciting. Was Joe "the one"? That doesn't matter. Now that we are married he is "the one" for me and I am "the one" for him. We submit to each other and to God as He weaves our souls together.

Personally, I don't subscribe to the idea of a soul mate as defined as follows: the romantic idea that every person has a counterpart and can only be completed by being with that counterpart. The fundamental problem with the idea of a soul mate is that one person cannot complete another. Humans were created to worship God, and only by allowing Christ to renew our createdness can we be complete.

For awhile I went through a phase where I thought I had to be completely content in Christ before meeting "the one", but that too was a lie. If marriage is meant to depict the relationship of Christ to the Church with Him calling broken people to Himself and making them beautiful through his sacrifice and ensuing bond, then we don't have to be perfectly content in Christ before entering into a Christian marriage. Part of our createdness was that we were designed for physical companionship.

As a Christian, my idea of marriage is that the man's and woman's souls are woven together with God, beginning on the wedding day. I thought that something supernatural would occur at the altar, and it did, but not in the way I expected. For me, that weaving together of souls is beautiful but not easy. The coming together takes a lifetime as we allow ourselves at times to be woven and at other times rebelliously tear at the threads. It takes action and work, lessons in humility and grace. The concept of a soul mate implies that the person has already been woven together with another person, perhaps with very loose threads, and they just have to figure out to whom they are stitched. Meanwhile, as they go through life looking, they end up weaving themselves to the wrong people and having to undo the weaving once they know it's not right. It sounds like a very large mess of yarn to me.

To believe that one person alone can provide us eternal happiness sets us on an overly burdensome and very selfish quest to find that one person. The quest revolves about ourselves and our happiness. Garry Thomas writes, "God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy." This sounds cold, religious, and just nasty to hopeless romantics. However, if we abandon being happy, being right, being comfortable for being more like Jesus, we become complete, our marriage thrives, and we experience the deepest truest love of a lifetime. It is very romantic, very sacrificial, and amazingly beautiful and sexy.

The idea of a soul mate implies that the relationship is indestructible - indestructible because it was forged in the fires of destiny, nothing can feign it, and nothing can break it. I will say this once. Marriage is fragile. Love is fragile. You have to work your butt off to make it last. If there were such a thing as a soul mate, either half the population wasn't created with one or just couldn't find theirs, another chunk of the population settled for something less (which is maybe why some folks can't find theirs), and a very small fraction of people got lucky.

Marriages crumble around us, and it is no wonder people delay it longer and longer. The deal is we have replaced willingness for work and sacrifice with trying to find someone who fits well enough that work and sacrifice aren't needed. Broken people will never fit well enough. We aren't jagged edges of a plate that can be glued back together and be functional. We are a million shards of glass all over the kitchen floor. Even if our shards are from the same mold, they are disastrously messy.

Joe and I continually work on our marriage. Usually, when things get strained, it's because we have become lazy, not because things around us are getting tough. If anything, tough times grow us as we choose to lean into each other and into God. As we endure, all aspects get better. When we were dating, I once looked at Joe with googly eyes and said, "You make me so happy." He said very seriously, "Don't ever tell me that again. I don't want my job to be to make you happy. It's too great a burden." He was more right than he knew at the time. The funny thing is that as we make each other holy by pushing each other towards Christ, we have found deep joy and even times of happiness.