Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My husband is not my romantic ideal. He’s also kind of terrible in bed. He’s such a golden human though. Big hearted and supportive. I’m lucky in that. I’d love a big romance too. What I have is steady and good.

You're one of the lucky ones, truly. Except for the terrible in bed part. Have you considered a sex therapist?

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:

Anonymous wrote:I think there are soulmates out there for everyone.

You just settled before you found yours. You made a choice, and you chose to have a warm body instead of being lonely.

It's just compatibility IMO. If you hold out for the right person, you know it feels right. But you might miss out on other milestones. Only you can know if settling is the right choice. Again, all choices we make.

Soul mates don't exist, compatibility does. If two people decide they are soulmates, that's great. Just needs two very romantic people to make that decision and create that reality as best they can. But fundamentally it is a fiction. There are only greater and lesser degrees of compatibility.

Anonymous wrote:OP, I'm very sympathetic to what you are saying because I often feel the same way. I didn't have the best family or childhood, and I don't feel like I'm the "best person" in part because I've had to work hard just to be a functional person.

I feel like people who grow up feeling very loved and nurtured in their relationships with parents and siblings are better at finding/picking mates who will also be loving and nurturing. I didn't have that so I had no idea.

It's hard at midlife to think about these things. It's like the adage "the rich get richer" only instead of financial wealth, these people are rich in love and community. I come from a long line of neglected children.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think there are soulmates out there for everyone.

You just settled before you found yours. You made a choice, and you chose to have a warm body instead of being lonely.

It's just compatibility IMO. If you hold out for the right person, you know it feels right. But you might miss out on other milestones. Only you can know if settling is the right choice. Again, all choices we make.

Soul mates don't exist, compatibility does. If two people decide they are soulmates, that's great. Just needs two very romantic people to make that decision and create that reality as best they can. But fundamentally it is a fiction. There are only greater and lesser degrees of compatibility.

Anonymous wrote:My husband is not my romantic ideal. He’s also kind of terrible in bed. He’s such a golden human though. Big hearted and supportive. I’m lucky in that. I’d love a big romance too. What I have is steady and good.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People who don’t believe in soulmates have never found theirs.

Or they’re grown ups.

Anonymous wrote:People who don’t believe in soulmates have never found theirs.

Anonymous wrote:I think there are soulmates out there for everyone.

You just settled before you found yours. You made a choice, and you chose to have a warm body instead of being lonely.

It's just compatibility IMO. If you hold out for the right person, you know it feels right. But you might miss out on other milestones. Only you can know if settling is the right choice. Again, all choices we make.

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.