REFLECTION
Soul Mates
Do they exist or are they just #fakenews?
Why is it that people insist there’s one person for everyone? Or that everyone will “find someone” who loves them and cherishes them and stays with them for the rest of their lives. Is something truly meant to last a lifetime? Surely, love cannot last a lifetime.
Love is a series of biochemical reactions in our brain. Literally a chemical imbalance in our bodies. The human body is known to self-regulate. When it gets ill, white blood corpuscles act on it and get us healthy again. So surely, when the human body goes through a chemical imbalance, it self regulates and brings hormones back to how they were originally. So why do we insist that true love lasts forever? Anything that lasts forever has been tampered with. Even long-life milk contains preservatives, so how can we say that anything will last forever? It’s a very bold claim indeed.
Perhaps what lasts forever is an attachment. You get accustomed to having someone around and when they leave, it hurts like a bitch. That’s not love. That’s a self-centric desire to have things stay the way they have always been. It is not the loss that we fear, it is change.
Two people cannot be soul mates. That two people’s souls, their essence is somehow connected to each other and they will form a romantic attachment is a claim I find somewhat preposterous. I believe in physical attraction. I believe in being drawn to someone because of how they think. I believe in a connection that exists between two people because of similar interests, backgrounds, and experiences. But to suggest that anything will last forever is very bold.
Even a married couple that has stayed together through thick and thin cannot possibly insist that the flame of their love burns as strongly as it did at the very beginning.
Brothers and sisters go years without seeing each other. They fight for everything. As kids, they fight for the bigger room, perhaps the better car, a better computer. As adults, they drift apart because life gets in the way. When they meet, it’s not just sibling rivalry, it’s family rivalry. One sibling fighting the other for the title of ‘Best Family’.
Friends drift apart when they have misunderstandings. It takes years for them to reunite, if at all.
The point is, nothing lasts forever. The only true connection that lasts is that of the parent with a child. Not even the other way around, because kids can be scum (which is why I look forward to having zero of my own kids). A parent will forgive every piece of dumb shit that the child might do (unless it’s crime). A parent’s soul mate is the child. And that is because a child is literally a part of the parent. Fragments of two humans literally come together to form the child. How can they not be connected in a way deeper than we can hope to understand?
Everything else is transient.
Disclaimer: My parents did not pay me to say this.