Soulmates

If you believe in soulmates, you fundamentally believe that there is one person somewhere in the world who you are destined for. He/she is complimentary to you, and once you meet this person you become ‘one’ with them. Plato created this theory, and he believed that every person is a half, and was separated before birth from their soulmate, and that we spend our whole life trying to find this other half. I find this kind of scary.

What if you never find your other half? There are loads of people in the world, and thousands of people die alone or die after having married the wrong person and living in a loveless marriage. This puts a whole new meaning on the hilarious ‘Forever Alone’ memes, and suggests that some people really are Forever Alone! Maybe you are just destined for it.


Although obviously I am 17 and am not seriously worrying about this, after doing some googling, I have found out that according to the theory, your ‘other half’ could be somewhere completely different to you. What if your other half is in Japan? What if he/she is in Africa? Or, what if you walked past your ‘other half’ as you were getting off the District Line this morning, and missed your chance at enteral happiness because you were unaware that this person ‘completes’ you?

I think that if you believe in soulmates, you have to believe in fate. You have to believe that somehow the universe will push you together (I know this from ‘How I Met Your Mother’ in which the characters love talking about the apparently alive entity which is ‘the universe’). For example, if you were to walk past your soulmate whilst getting off the tube this morning the universe would not allow you to just walk past them, there would have to be a sequence of events. For instance:

1. You get off the District Line and walk down the platform. When you get into the station you see your soulmate, but don’t really notice him/her because, lets face it, they look like everybody else. (If soulmates do exist, really what the universe should do is make your soulmate glow so as to avoid confusion.)
2. Of course, because the universe does not, for some reason, make people glow, it steps in and would make sure that the soulmate in question drops his/her oyster card on the floor, because he/she is clumsy (so adorable because so are you!!!) and so you pick it up to give it back.
3. Because you ‘complete’ one another, you start to have a long conversation about something deep and interesting, in which one or two hilarious anecdotes are told (because who could instantly fall in love with someone who doesn't have any great anecdotes at hand?)
4. You'd then be separated from this person by something like a massive rush of people who carry him/her away into the distance, and you would despair about the fact that you never got their phone number. However, obviously if you are really soul mates then you could simply send them a telepathic message.
5. You would go home and chant, 'meet me at the park, meet me at the park' in your head, and then when you got to the park they'd be there chilling out. Or, what you could do is dial random numbers into your phone, and if you're meant to be together then you'll end up calling them. Once they pick up they will tell you that they are so grateful you called because they felt an undeniable connection between the two of you.

Of course, if this happened to me, the undeniable connection comment would completely freak me out, and I would hang up and try to avoid them for the rest of my life. However if we are in a world where fate and soul mates do exist, I would then continually run into this person who I never called, and each time would feel this ‘undeniable connection’. One day I would succumb and realise that when I was 17 I was stupid and cynical, and obviously soulmates exist because otherwise how come me and this guy have so much in common.

So, the moral of the story is: be cynical about everything because if you are proved wrong you can be happy that the world is not as dark as you thought it was, and if you are right you have the satisfaction of being right.