Thursday, January 10, 2013

You are My Denisty?

I don't exactly remember the first time I had the thought that I had a soul mate, one true love hanging out somewhere on this planet waiting for me to find him.  Or, maybe I was waiting for him to find me.  I may have been born boy crazy because I also have no recollection of a period in my life where I thought they were gross.  Quite the contrary, I liked them and I beat them up and I hid from them maybe before I could talk.  If I thought really hard about it, I could probably list my main, secondary, and tertiary crushes from every grade.  That's the thing.  When I was little, I didn't like just one boy, I liked many of them.  I was a nudist, polyamorous wild child who would beat up the boys she adored and then hide from them when they tried to talk to her.  That pretty much continued through middle school (although I spent a lot more time dressed). Of course, I had been subjected to a world of Disney princesses and bad romantic comedies, so I think there was a little spark of an idea that maybe there was one boy out there who was right for me.  But, mostly, I liked a whole bunch of them at once.

It's hard to say if it was organized religion or my hormones that changed my outlook so much because my religions and my hormones came all at the same time.  I became a Mormon when I was 12 and left when I was 16.  During those particularly awkward years, there was a whole lot of talk about what my future husband would be like.  I was taught that there was one good Mormon man out there that would be so right for me that I would surrender my life and desires and reproductive organs, so I could spend eternity loving him and cleaning his house.  I think this is probably when the idea of soul mate took root in my psyche.  I entered the church with my eye on a missionary and several boys in the congregation, spent most of my time in the church in a very pure and needy relationship with the Holy Spirit, and left the church thinking that every crush I had was potentially my soul mate. Love had lost its innocence and become all serious.

In the twelve years that I've been dating, I've had some big loves (and losses) and have certainly thought more than once that I had found my forever person.  And, as I look back on the big ones now, I can say with certainty that they all could have worked.  The men in question were all very different and appealed to different natures in me, but those relationships really could have worked out, and I would have been happy in any of them.  And, I'm also equally glad that none of them did work out.  As much as I loved the ones that got away, I am so eternally grateful that I'm not married and that I don't have children.  I love the children in my life very dearly, and I also enjoy the times that I'm in a relationship.  But, above all these things, I relish my freedom.  But, despite all of this, I still catch myself observing a boy I like to see if he displays any soul mate characteristics.  I just can't help it!

So, lately I've been thinking a lot about this whole soul mate business and whether or not I give it any stock.  And, I have to say that I don't.  At least, not in the literal sense.  There are people in my life that love and enrich me, and I like to think that they're my soul mates.  And, maybe that's just me being poetic.  But, when it comes to the idea of one true love, I just can't get on board.  I'm not saying that I don't believe in lasting love or monogamy or marriage.  Just the opposite.  I believe all of those things can and do work.  I even believe it's possible for all of those things to work for me.  But, I don't believe that there is only one boy in the world for me.  I've loved too many people that it could have worked with.  And, I will love more people that it could work with.  When it comes to love, I think there's the right person at the right time.  It's all about timing.  My therapist used to say that to me, and I hated it.  It felt like he was cheapening the idea of romance.  But, I understand what he was saying now.  We are a dynamic species.  Love happens when you meet and recognize a fellow traveler on the same path as you.  Some of those travelers are lucky enough to be travelling the same direction their whole lives.  Some choose to go the same way.  And, many break off into different directions.

I guess what I'm saying is, when it comes to fate/destiny, I believe it is a product of our choices and not vice-versa.  My destiny is what I choose it to be, and the people that are right for me while on my journey will find me (or I will find them), and we will call it fate.  And some of us will be fated to stay together forever because we chose to be.