It’s August 2008, in Tupelo.
A short gorgeous exotic woman with long black hair sits in front of me at the WIN Job Center office and smiles. My mind takes flight with excitement as her beauty steals my heart and holds it hostage.
She accidently drops her cellphone, and every male in the building seems to react to assist her in recovering it. But luck had it for me to make the save and pick it up for her. As I place it in her hand, my mind wanders, if after countless failed relationships, could the stars finally be aligning to send me my “soul mate”? Just hours earlier, I had driven to Tupelo for an interview in hopes of getting a supervisory job at the Toyota factory in Blue Springs.
“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” the job service case worker says to me after calling my name for my interview. “She’s from Thailand.”
And with those words, my enthusiasm dims. My soul mate-the perfectly designed woman just for me, whose image I’ve carried around in my mind for as long as I can remember- would definitely not be a woman who could barely speak English.
Then I caught myself before my mind shuts. Take it easy, Rodney, you are not a teenager anymore, and can’t afford to believe in soul mates or tooth fairies.
But this notion is hard to dismiss since it seems to be everywhere. It’s in every romantic comedy, and most movies.
It also doesn’t help that I know a couple blissful couples that seems like soul mates to me, like The Enterprise-Tocsin editor Bryan Davis and his wife, Mayor Steve and Robin Rosenthal, Mr. Carver and Mrs. Rosie Randle, as well as Mr. Ken Johnson and Mrs. Debra Johnson.
With this kind of pressure, who could blame me for thinking my soul mate is going to one day step out of the clouds, or is a beautiful damsel in distress just waiting for me to rescue her from loneliness? Studies show that more than 90% percent of adults believe they have a “Soul Mate” somewhere just waiting for them, and he or she will complete them and make them whole.
The Bible has more to say about arranged marriages than it does about finding a soul mate.
In Proverbs 18: 22, King Solomon states “He who finds a wife finds a good thing.” In Psalms, King David states “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desire of your heart.” In 1 Corinthians, Paul says that we are free to marry anyone as long as the prospective mate belongs to the Lord. The idea of soul mates comes from the Greek philosopher Plato’s symposium, in which he said humans originally had two heads, four arms, four legs and were both man and woman.
They angered the gods and Zeus split them in half, condemning them to a lifelong search for their other half.
Thus creating the idea of soul mates. I’ve spent so much time looking for Miss Perfect that I may have overlooked Miss Pretty Darn Good Enough.
When people get stuck on the idea of finding a Mr. or Ms. Right, it can cause confusion, isolation, suffering and frustration. Instead of soul mates, we should seek true mates- people who relate to our true essence.
True mates are happier because they don’t long for something that is difficult or impossible for their mate to deliver.
They put God at the center of their relationship and are at the highest level of happiness. In the end, a true mate is a person who sees all your imperfections perfectly and accepts you in spite of them…
