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Originally Posted by fable  Well, yes, but this isn't what the concept of "soulmates" is all about. It presupposes a single individual every person is truly destined for, someone who represents "their other half." It has nothing to do with statistics, and everything to do with some kind of planning. Prediestination is not something I care for, in any religion, or any form.  |
That's all well and good, but the question was about our own personal philosophies on the subject. mr_sir was just stating his own idea on the subject, not whether or not he believed in the classical idea of the soul mate. To limit his personal philosophy of "soul mate" to the widely-accepted version of the term
in order to analyze his own different belief makes him look just dead wrong, as he clearly strayed outside that path. Not to mention the possibility that such a comment alienated him, and may have cost him a few HP off his Self Esteem bar.
That being said, of *course* there is a soul mate for everyone! One person in all the world that can complete you and no one else can possibly do. And if you don't find that one unique fit, you spend the entirety of your life incomplete, never feeling that sense of wholeness we all are told we need, and who wants that? This is why divorce rates are near 50/50 in the US: we can't find our soul mates! Not even with the expensive help of professional match makers who take a reading of your soul and compare it to other souls on the market for a perfect match (because if you are using a match-making site, clearly your soul mate has to be on there waiting for you to find them). It accounts for the suicide rates, because we feel so incomplete and lonely, and the lonlieness just gets to me... I mean us... I mean them! I remember in a Sociology class being told that Atheists and Protestants seemed statistically more likely to kill themselves, and if Atheists don't believe in souls or in predetermined match-making, we can't possibly find a soul made, so it's no wonder we pop ourselves off more frequently. And it's always so handy that the vast majority of us just happen to find our soul mates in the immediate neighborhood. We don't actually have to go out looking for them all across the world, because who we are destined to be with is seven times out of ten right in our own backyard.
As fable mentioned, this "soul mate" idea did have a shaky beginning. Why it is so very much embraced is beyond me, but so are a lot of the norms that the US seems to hold to. Before "soul mates" there was bride-buying (not to say these are the only two options, or that the latter was the only way people chose spouses). Not entirely as romantic, seeing how a family might prostitute out their daughter in order to gain more money, power, prestige. Some marriages were arranged, more out of necessity than out of love. So, between the two, it's easy to see why we would choose soul mates over dowry-bought mates. Although little really changes as a result except that we can now claim that we choose who to be "mates" with. The whole "soul mate" thing is just flash designed to sell the idea of love.
The soul mate in its contemporary definition I do not believe in. Nor do I believe anyone is truly "incomplete" nor can they only become whole once they have found that special someone that they are fated to meet. A soul mate is, in my opinion, the person you deem to be worthy of the title. It doesn't mean anything, not really, but, like a piece of colorful cloth or a word, the meaning in such things comes from us and are not inherent in the term itself. "Soul mate" may get batted around a lot, but that's what it is there for: it is a piece of fluff designed to garner attention. The feelings behind that display piece are far more important.