Soul Mates

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s spectacular public meltdown has gotten me thinking about this whole concept of soul mates. Basically, there are two schools of thoughts here. One, the High Romance version, loosely bastardized from Plato, says that for each of us there is one perfect person, the romance that, in the words of (fictional) Jerry Maguire will “complete me.” Our romantic life is a search for this person and, once we find him or her, bliss will ensue.

I don’t buy this. For one reason, the practical: what if we don’t meet this person? What if we do, and then he or she dies? What if s/he is married to someone else? Is it at all logical to think that in a world of 6,706,993,152 (July 2008 est.) population, only one of them is our romantic fit? I hope not.

A Course In Miracles is particularly harsh on this train of thought, calling it the “illusion of the special relationship,” which is no more than the “ego’s chief weapon for keeping you from Heaven” (341) because of the value you place on this relationship, and your Self in it, to the exculsion of ultimate Reality. I’m not a Course in Miracles teacher, expert or even more than a curious reader, so if this intrigues you, turn to other teachers such as Marianne Williamson or Gary Renard for more explication.

The other definition of a soul mate that I’ve come across is that the Soul Mate is a person who indeed carries part of your Soul Group and because of this, you remind each other of the places in your lives where you are disconnected from your highest self and your destiny and tasks in this human lifetime. That is, a soul mate enters your life, completely disrupts it, usually through heartbreak, in the course of which you are set you back on the path you need to be on. Then the soul mate leaves your life. It’s not pretty, frequently deeply painful and rarely results in lifelong bliss and contentment. However, when you are able to surrender to the experience (that is, among other things, not fight to keep it going once its time has ended), you will come out of it a more authentic person, more likely to find happiness and love with a different partner.

Under this definition, Mark Sanford most definitely met his Soul Mate in his Argentinian Maria. Look at how his cool professional demeanor utterly cracked as he wept at his press conference. His marriage is probably ending: His complulsion to continually deconstruct this relationship in public, while perfectly familiar to us high obsessive types, is not a move that will endear him to the wife (Relationship tip: if you want to reconcile with someone, best not to announce to the Associated Press that your lover was your soul mate but you are going to “try” to learn to love your wife again). His career as he had projected it is almost certainly over.
He is becoming a much more interesting, and, I imagine, authentic person. His pain is forcing him to a level of grief, self-examination and public humiliation that is fascinating to watch. Where he goes with this is up to him, but at the moment, his naked humanity is utterly revealing. He’s a mess. We’ve all been there.

Here’s the thing: we never really know why someone enters our life and why that person leaves. Romantic love is a shapshifter, sometimes granting us our deepest longings, sometimes showing us illusions we need to give up.