Soulmate Thoughts •• Some Blog Site

Soulmate Thoughts

Mar

2022

Somewhere along the way, the idea caught on (whether via romance novels or Hollywood or other) that there is one person in this world whom you were meant to marry. It does make for a good romance story – finding your one true love.

But I disagree that’s how the world works.

And I think that idea is bad for marriage.

First of all, if your chance of finding the right spouse was really 1 in a few billion, just about no one would ever have a good marriage. Those are horrible odds.

Second of all, throughout 99.2% of history, people have not had the luxury of searching the world for their one true love. So their search for love was confined to their local area. Again, what are the odds that your one true love would happen to be from your town, or the next town over? Yet people have successful marriages in this situation.

You may say “well, they had to make those marriages work, because they didn’t really have much of a choice.” And that’s the point, whether you have much of a choice or not, you have to make your marriage work. The problem with spouse-finding today is that people are not so much contrained by geography, so the wider-cast net brings so many choices, and that brings anxiety about making the right choice, and easy regret about making the wrong choice. Look up “the paradox of choice” for more on that effect.

And lastly, the reason it is bad – it puts people in the wrong mindset about marriage. If someone is looking for his one true love, let’s assume he finds someone and marries her. Then, because they are two different people and nothing is ever perfect, they start to have a disagreement after a little while. Things get rocky, and because he is of the understanding that his soulmate is supposed to be out there, he gets to thinking that this woman he married must not really be his soulmate. Therefore, he thinks he must have married the wrong person, and then the marriage really falls apart.

If he’s expecting there is one person meant for him, what will he do when the relationship starts to get rocky? Lament that “I thought she was the one…” Well, if you married her, then she was the one. Is the one. Make it work.

Successful marriage isn’t about finding the perfect match, but about being a good spouse. Most people throughout history didn’t get too much of a choice of a spouse, but still had good marriages because they got out of it what they put into it. And they didn’t expect to be a perfect match.

Don’t get me wrong – I still think you could make a wrong choice about someone. Just because there is not a 1:1 soulmate ratio out there doesn’t mean that just anyone would be a good spouse for you.

Think of it like the lesson from Ratatouille: not that everyone can be a good spouse for you, but that a good spouse can be from anywhere. Or maybe not exactly like that, but you get the idea.

So it came about at the time that Merab, Saul’s daughter, was to be given to David, that she was given instead to Adriel the Meholathite as a wife.

1 Samuel 18:19