Bruce, do you have a “soulmate”? The short answer is “no.”
First, I don’t don’t have a “soul” and neither does Polly, my partner of forty-seven years. There’s no evidence for the existence of the soul, and without one, I can’t have a “soulmate” and neither can Polly.
Second, there are millions of females on planet Earth I could have married and been happy with. Am I really expected to believe that Polly was the only person for me; that if I had never married her, I wouldn’t be happy? This is absurd, to say the least.
That said, I am happily married. By all accounts, we have a good marriage, and we get along with each other 98.9% of the time. All I am saying is that had I met a different woman and married her, it is possible we could have been happily married too. Of course, we also could have had the marriage from hell. Life is a crapshoot, and that includes marriage.
Do you have a soulmate? How do you know that person is the only person out of eight billion people just for you? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I feel the same way. But I sure do love my husband and he’s #1.
This take is exactly what I have long thought. We see the life we have and can’t seriously consider it happening any other way. How many times do we hear people say ‘just think, if I hadn’t been at such and such a place at such and such a time we never would have met’. In reality, there is a near infinite set of circumstances that might have directed our lives down another path, one in which we would be saying the same thing about different ‘soulmates’ and friends.
I will play the “what if” game now and again. I’ve had so many traumatic moments in my life. These moments changed my path in life. Had I lived in one community and attended the same school, I suspect my life would have been different. Alas, I will never know. Life is what it is. I’m grateful for the life I’ve been given. Sure, I wish I wasn’t sick or in pain, but that aside, life is good.
Good afternoon, Bruce. Greetings from Cali. I read your article with interest, it reminds me of the Robert Frost poem,” The Path Not Taken.” Thinking about trauma, and how it affects people later in life, the more adverse experiences( ACE) we have, the more it bungs up our immune systems. Like fibromyalgia. I had no idea until recently that people often get this condition, especially women, thanks to physical and emotional abuse. It goes undiagnosed lots of the time, since doctors don’t screen for it, some don’t believe it’s real, either. I’ll bet that people in these abusive churches wind up sick from what they’ve gone through more often than they realize!
I don’t believe in souls or soul mates. Relationships are about choices, communication, compromise, commitment.
Hello Bruce. You are probably familiar with this Tim Minchin tune but just in case, this is the perfect song to go with you soulmate essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn6gV2sdl38
Relationships are created by experience. That person who passed you like two ships in the night could have been the love of your life, but if you don’t meet and experiences aren’t fostered then it amounts nothing. I think one hint the soul mate hypothesis is absurd is that humans aren’t a monogamous species.
As for having a soul. The brain and mind are certainly much greater than the sum of their parts, in addition each person is fundamentally unique. So I’d grant that we have a soul that is a metaphor for these aspects of the human person, though obviously the “magic” dies when the brain does.
Well said Troy. The vague word “soul” can and does define the sum total of all the mysterious processes going on in the human brain, or “mind” or “personality,” if one vague word can define another. Religious implication is inevitable, but is certainly less than what soul is generally understood to mean. It’s generally agreed what soul means. Where we differ is the survival of the soul after death. As an agnostic, I’ll believe the soul survives the flesh when I see some evidence.