Anonymous wrote:It’s a juvenile concept. Souls don’t even exist. It’s a longing to heal all your wounds from being raised in a family where you were fully seen and fulfilled. You’ll need to unpack that and move on from this silly fairytale idea.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s a juvenile concept. Souls don’t even exist. It’s a longing to heal all your wounds from being raised in a family where you were fully seen and fulfilled. You’ll need to unpack that and move on from this silly fairytale idea.

Attachments do exist. Strong, exhilarating love exists even in the elderly proved by MRIs. Their brains light up differently when they see their beloved.

Where did PP say attachments don’t exist?? It’s silly to think you have a soul that was given to you at birth or wandering around until it inhabited your body and it is somehow “meant to be” with another one of these souls.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s a juvenile concept. Souls don’t even exist. It’s a longing to heal all your wounds from being raised in a family where you were fully seen and fulfilled. You’ll need to unpack that and move on from this silly fairytale idea.

Attachments do exist. Strong, exhilarating love exists even in the elderly proved by MRIs. Their brains light up differently when they see their beloved.

Anonymous wrote:I don't like the concept of deserving or putting a moral glaze on it as that to me suggests people who aren't in relationships are somehow bad or defective. My aunt recently passed away and the church was full of her students (she was a special Ed teacher). Her not being married or finding a "soul mate" wasn't because she was less than.

Anonymous wrote:It’s a juvenile concept. Souls don’t even exist. It’s a longing to heal all your wounds from being raised in a family where you were fully seen and fulfilled. You’ll need to unpack that and move on from this silly fairytale idea.

Anonymous wrote:I struggle with the word soulmate (souls?), but DH is definitely the love of my life. We've been madly in love since we met 20 years ago. It also has nothing to do with looks or physical attraction. Haven't you all ever seen very old couples who are still obsessed with each other? 80 and 90 year olds? What dh and I have goes so far beyond best friends or spouses. He's my favorite person in the whole world.

It always shocks me when people talked about settling or putting up with things. Or even assortative mating. I stay quiet because I understand it logically, but it wasn't what I wanted in life. I would have stayed single forever than married someone just to have kids or to marry for money.

Anonymous wrote:It’s a juvenile concept. Souls don’t even exist. It’s a longing to heal all your wounds from being raised in a family where you were fully seen and fulfilled. You’ll need to unpack that and move on from this silly fairytale idea.

Anonymous wrote:Luck and timing play a bigger role in mating success than people are willing to admit. If I turned right on a Tuesday instead of left on a Wednesday, or didn't move to a certain city, my life would be completely different. You are analyzing factors that might not have much to with your individual situation.

And stop being so hard on yourself. I would be that a lot of people on here are average.

Anonymous wrote: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.