Soulmates are only half the story

I recently started watching an Amazon show called Soulmates. It’s based on a vague sci-fi premise of a near future in which everyone can take a test to find their one true soulmate anywhere in the world. So people are constantly divorcing their non-soulmate spouses and moving halfway across the world in search of this one perfect relationship.

As a show it only half works; every episode features a different scenario, highlighting all the ways in which such a singular focus on one perfect match is detrimental. Given that’s the only point it is making, it gets a bit repetitive. With an ensemble cast, they also go for the usual approach of putting the best actors into the first episode, and whilst that had me hooked for more, other actors did not have quite the chops to make the subsequent, more esoteric storylines plausible. Ironically, the first episode had a vanilla, slightly cliché set-up, but Sarah Snook’s monologue about the power of childbirth as a bonding experience that supersedes the soulmate bond certainly resonated.

Others, when they find their soulmate, realise that their existing partners were their strength in other ways. In one somewhat wacky episode, a swinger couple ends up living with their respective soulmates, but still stays together. As one of them is a same sex soulmate, many complications ensue. At one point, the main character says:

She is my soulmate, but you are my heart

This was so touching, it was really the whole point of the show. When we are young, we think romantic life is simple – you feel the spark, you are lifted on the clouds of a nirvana of peaceful existence with your one true love. Almost all of us find this, or think we find this. We meet a person who understands our deepest, darkest hearts and accepts us as we are. Sometimes, this is all that happens; both parties remain in a similar state of passionate bond, in love as much with each other as with the idea of love. But it seems more frequently the case that real life gets in the way. One party uses their insights into the other to manipulate them. They may well still love them, but their own emotional issues lead them to do great harm. And so the bond falls away, the feeling of understanding is broken by betrayal of one sort or another. I was talking about this show with a friend of mine, who has been married three times. It was a rather awkward conversation, because we were walking back from a somewhat tense reunion of college friends, which can be difficult as we regress to our child-like selves, and share quite offensive but true thoughts that were quite unnecessary. So I was trying to avoid any discussion of what had happened, and find a light-hearted subject – the offensive conversation was so bad that changing the subject to talk about divorce and heartbreak was light-hearted. I can’t really remember the exact details of the conversation, as it was months ago, but it was interesting, probably because we were both trying hard to avoid talking about the other conversation.

Do you think there is such a thing as a soulmate? Have you ever had one?

I don’t know. My first wife broke my heart though, and it’s different after that. You never give so much away again. I’m happy now, but I’m not sure I’m the same.

I think when we’re younger, we mistake those dark personalities for people who understand us. I feel like my ex maybe understood me best, but I made him feel insecure. He seemed to want criticism, and if he didn’t get it, he handed it out instead. Maybe it does change you.

Yeah well I saw her again recently, and she’s got fat and ugly.

Must’ve felt good. Her thinness was her USP really. And yeah, she was a bitch.

We wandered down Villiers Street to Embankment a bit more, chit chatting about the present happiness of our relationships. But what he did not bring into the conversation for one second was the mother of his children.

That, to me, is what changes our relationships from the indulgence of romantic fancy into real lives with real consequences, and the future happiness of generations. People who do not have children have the luxury of their own feelings being the centre of their world, and of their happiness arising from each other. They can cocoon themselves in images and stories of who they are, and how they relate to the world, which they never need to challenge. Parents do not have that choice. They can be the most perfect soulmates, or partners of convenience; either way, the hard choices of raising children expose them to feet of clay in ways that they never expected when they danced to Ed Sheeran at their picture perfect weddings. My ex will probably always see me as a little capsule of romantic love, which he crowbarred open. But he will never share the true vulnerability of either becoming a parent, or slowly realising in full just how much even well matched spouses will differ in their perception of how to raise a family based on the highs and lows of their own relationship with their parents.

Childless couples can create the world anew, setting sail for a tropical island of their own making. Parents are dragged back to the old shores, full of the festering wounds of their own childhood. Assuming both parties can accept the gravity of their responsibilities to their family, I think it renders the whole idea of soulmates obsolete – because it’s no longer about us at all, it’s about the future and the past. We almost put ourselves on hold, and all that stuff about whether we are “fulfilled” exists only in relation to the happiness or difficulties of our children.

We watch our own past as we watch them grow, and we comfort them in their apprehension of the future, because we know what it felt like, and we know that none of those fears materialise. As a child, I was terrified of my parents dying, but when they did, it felt both heart-breaking and natural. I was grateful, after a while, that my father lives on in me, that he gave me so much (along with what he took away), and that he will live on in my children. There is a grain of him that maybe will be there in the world forever, and I tell my children when they express those fears that I can never really die, because I am in every cell of their bodies.

Those are my soulmates, and as I look at my husband, I see the circle of life in completion, and I hold his hand.