Soul Mates

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mate's purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life...

- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

 Ahhhh. Well, in that case, I have had so many soul mates I can hardly count them. Is that very lucky, or terribly unlucky? I suppose that I have the privilege of living a life of being smacked down so many times and bouncing back as many times, at least in love. Love is the one place in my life that is like the ocean. Where almost everything else in my life is disgustingly stable - great family, wonderful job, fabulous friends, intelligence, creativity, soul, self-awareness, and hey, sometimes even good looks - love, for me, is rocking, stormy, tempestuous, almost inconceivably deep and ever-changing, always surprising, changing colors in an instant, never to be taken for granted. Like the ocean, love, for me, can kill without warning, or it can buoy me up. Sometimes both simultaneously. Like the sailor says: Never turn your back on the ocean. For me it's "never turn your back on love." I've learned to have great respect for this torrent of emotion, but still I insist on wading in deeply, beyond the breakers, and letting the waves do to me what they will.

In Cancun last year with my soul mate, I once tried to follow him into the surf. He's a sailor and grew up swimming in the ocean off of Florida. He knows how to get beyond the breakers and float on the salty water. It doesn't scare him.  I got out there, but the sense that I was drifting, anchor-less, terrified me. The waves rose above my head and I'd panic, trying to regain my footing, which was impossible. I was tense and the water attacked me because I wouldn't give in to it. Meanwhile, my love floated effortlessly several feet away, like a sea otter. Finally, I paddled back to shore, anxious and afraid. When I got to the beach, I consoled myself by looking for sea shells. On a sea cliff not far from where we'd put our towels and clothes, someone had carved, in 2-foot-tall letters, "Te Amo." I Love You. When my love came back to the beach, I showed it to him. "You didn't write that?" he asked. "No," I said. It seemed to be a sign of some kind.

In the breakup of this relationship and in the preceding  years of stormy seas interspersed with waters of a placid, mirror-like calm, I've seen myself clinging like a drowning woman to the broken timbers of my ego, my expectations, my assumptions, and my fantasies, while the waves, in the form of my love for this man, tried to strip me from those comforts, tried to hurl me into the depthless water, tried to force me to swim on my own. Again this has happened. He tells me that I need to let go of all that, that even the pain is comfortable to me because I'm used to it. He tells me that he understands my fear of the unknown, but that I don't have a choice; this ship of ego is going down. To cling to it would be suicide. But the thought of letting go, of letting the waves take me - to either drown me or support me, I don't know -  is utterly, mind-splinteringly horrifying. I know that if I relax into them, they will support me, but their fluidity panics me. And in my panic,  I tense up and cling, and my body gets heavy and I start to sink, which panics me even more.

Was I lucky to meet this soul mate, or terribly unlucky? I suppose, from a perspective of awakening, I was very lucky. He did to me exactly what Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in the passage above about soul mates. And he made me go hunting for my Water Wings. Now where did I put those?

All the Textures of Love, Part I

Shoving an Elephant into a Shoebox

Lately, I’m slowly coming to the realization that love has more than one face. It happened when I fell in love, and our love staunchly refused to be put into any box. The details aren’t important, but what I ended up with was a love relationship that had no name – he is and was sometimes my lover, sometimes my boyfriend, sometimes my partner, sometimes even my future, but at other times, none of those things. The only constant has been that we have always felt love, but the love has looked very different at different times. And in my futile efforts to give our relationship a name, I’ve experienced sadness, jealousy, anger, disappointment, frustration, and dashed hopes. I’ve cried, I’ve writhed on the floor in pain, I’ve regretted ever meeting him, I’ve despaired of ever being able to move on. And through it all I’ve learned some deep truths about myself and the great hole of need I’m asking love to fill.

After struggling for over a year, it started to dawn on me that maybe it’s OK for it not to have a name. Maybe, it’s OK for it to be exactly what it is, and to not have me constantly trying to make it into something it doesn’t want to be, as pointless as trying to shove an elephant into a shoebox.

In my deep, far-ranging conversations with my love about love, I realized that what we have been talking about has been nothing so much as the difference between fettering love and letting it free. True freedom, I realized profoundly from this experience, is terrifying even though it’s something most of us claim to want. And having structure, expectations, and rules is comforting, even when some of the rules can chafe sometimes. What is more terrifying than letting someone you love go to be exactly who they are? With no rules, no expectations for the future, and no right to chasten them when they show a facet of themselves that you didn’t know they possessed?

The implications, for most of us are frightening and confusing. What if he meets someone better than me and wants to be with them? What if we has more fun with someone else? What if they have better sex? Can I really trust him? Is he telling me everything? What does it mean about me that he doesn’t want to be my one and only? What if, what if, what if….???

On the other hand, don’t I want my love to be happy, no matter what? Even if it means letting him go? Isn’t that the measure of true love, in the same way a mother loves her child enough to let her go into the future, knowing there will be pain and hardship, but also knowing that clutching the child to her for too long will stunt the child? Isn’t that real love?

This is the question our culture doesn’t really encourage us to ask. As I’ve looked around me for role models for nontraditional relationships, I realize that, though I suspect these types of situations are far more common than we know, there is no conversation in the mainstream - or even most of the “alternative” media that I’ve seen - about alternatives to the “One man, one woman, one marriage certificate” type of heterosexual relationship.

In the moments when my heart has opened around this issue and I’ve let go of the clinging and the rules and the expectations of relationship, I’ve experienced a lightness, a joy, and a feeling of deep love for all beings. When I’ve felt myself constrict and attempt to hold on to a static, rulebound version of my love, I’ve experienced jealousy, doubt, and mistrust. Which of these is the better state? In which of these states do I want to live?

I intended to write all my thoughts about this in one blog post, but I realized that my questions about love are far too vast and complex to cover in one fell swoop. I’ll continue to explore this topic in future installments. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear from readers about their feelings, experiences, thoughts, and questions about this issue. Post a comment or write an e-mail. I’d like to hear from you!