All of Our Soulmates
Before Sunrise (1995) directed by Richard Linklater
Does everyone get to meet their soulmate? In the Oxford dictionary, a soulmate is a noun as in “a person ideally suited to another as a close friend or romantic partner.” That reeks of pre-internet. I’m pretty sure the last soulmate on record was actually in a Nora Ephron film, where the soulmate was always Meg Ryan in Seattle, Meg Ryan walking in Central Park, Meg Ryan fighting to save her bookstore and of course her soulmate 2 out of the 3 times was always Tom Hanks. But, what if you never get to meet your soulmate? Most people’s lives aren’t made into films or come even close to depicting one. The majority of people in this world are born, grow up, some move far away from their home state or country, while many others stay put in the same town they were born in. Either option is fair, a lot of us decide to make random choices. All because someone said out loud that your soulmate is out there. Go find them.
What about the ones that didn’t move and jettison to faraway places in search of a job, school or on a whimsical adventure. Are they supposed to believe that their own soulmate could possibly be in the neighboring town or belong to the same church and they just haven’t attended the same Sunday mass yet. How does this soulmate business really work and isn’t it time for a revision?
I do think that I’ve met my soulmate, only to then find another. How I knew is that each one fit into this mold of complete understanding, knowing without speaking kind of momentum between us, and that theory of you just know. And I never confided to anyone about this belief that there can be more than one soulmate for each person. It wasn’t a topic that I cared to take seriously with others. There are some that do take the philosophy of finding your soulmate quite seriously thanks to pop culture and cheesy rom-com’s. Some people do find the one, then there’s people like me who can gravitate towards a multitude of soulmates. In no way does that imply that I am special, it could perhaps infer that through modern advancements in our societies that a soulmate doesn’t strictly count as one person. I doubt that it ever did, and with the birth of the internet, soulmates spread like wildfire. Suddenly, our soulmate was in the chat room, on a dating app, in our DM’s.
