Reply to Does everyone deserve a soulmate?

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "Does everyone deserve a soulmate?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I spent a few years working in a developing country where a significant portion of the population lives in grinding poverty, and even in the middle and upper classes, most people are paired up in marriages arranged by their families, often between cousins.  It's an honor-shame culture in which divorce is often not permitted by families of the woman even in cases of domestic violence, and women are honor-killed with some regularity.  Domestic violence is common and seemed to be accepted by many people.  I had a colleague who was educated in the West and successful in her career, but married to a man who, every few months or so, would beat her violently.  She stayed with him and while she would complain about his abuse, between batterings she spoke of him and their family as if it were normal.  We had one deep conversation once where I asked her, after a beating, why she didn't just leave, and she said that when he first started beating her early in their marriage, she had asked her parents to go home and they said that if she did, they and she would be socially shunned, so no.  I pointed out that she could get a job overseas, and she said that she didn't want to separate her young son from his father because the son loved his dad so much (even though the dad beat the mom regularly).  This was really how she thought.  And I think many people in the world are in that situation.  Marriage and love are viewed very differently in many parts of the world.

And I thought a lot about how we view love and marriage in the West.  I concluded that "soulmates" are a luxury most people in the world don't even consider.

In our culture, we just have choices and the advantages of choice and education and options, but in the end, many of the love and soulmates fall apart after children.

I think that really meeting a soulmate is super rare.  We in the West are all trying to find one, but most of us don't, even if we thought we did at some point.

If beautiful and highly successful people were more likely to find soulmates, I don't think we would see so many divorces in celebrity/politician/pro athlete circles?

So maybe we all have the potential to find a soulmate, but most of us just...don't.

[/quote]
This was fascinating to read. We're lucky that we can even entertain the idea of finding a soul mate. We're lucky we can live alone if we choose.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics