Image source: Merlina McGovern
Everything in our popular culture pushes us toward pairing off with a soulmate. In a world of eight billion souls, only one other person out there is meant for you and only you. Of course, popular culture overweighs heteronormative couples and Western ideals of love.
And that ideal was what I was forever searching for in my younger years. I was never very popular, and all of my life, I’ve dealt with weight issues. This made me the poster child for the bookish nerd who would always be the funny best friend but never the lead in the romantic comedy of my life.
When I went off to the liberal mecca that is UC Berkeley for college, I was exposed to people from all around the world. People who wanted to escape the arranged marriage fate their parents went through (and others that were perfectly happy with the arrangement that didn’t have them putting themselves on display at the local meat market), people who found love within their same sex, people who were perfectly happy staying single.
It was there that I discovered that I should be focusing on my own self-development. Yes, I went to parties and clubs, but I also stayed up all night talking to friends. I immersed myself in the education, both from books and from my friends, that I was surrounded with. I stopped being so focused on finding someone. Instead, I focused on finding myself.
That way of living held for me as I left college and entered the workforce. And it’s a cliche, but it’s probably because it does ring true a lot of the time, but it was when I wasn’t looking that I finally found my soulmate. I just didn’t know that my soulmate at the time wouldn’t live in the same state, let alone the same city, as me. In fact, my soulmate lived on the East Coast in Boston, as far from the West Coast as you could be and still be in the same country.
And even though we it wasn’t yet the golden age of social media, we did still have easy communication technology like AOL Instant Messenger. I can still remember the descending and ascending chime sounds as we texted each other night and day across the thousands of miles that separated us.
It was a long-distance relationship, but we made it work. We liked the same books and movies. Our politics aligned, as did our spirituality and philosophy. The soulmate I had found admired me for my creativity and my passion for life. I loved how thoughtful this man was, how brilliantly his mind worked. We were and are true partners.
I have given our love and partnership a lot of thought as we passed our nineteenth anniversary of marriage together this week. Social media has been awash with “trad wife” content. I actually despise the trend because it’s false, and it promotes very rigid roles between men and women in a marriage.
My husband and I are forever learning and relearning our roles in our marriage and our family as we go through our various life stages. Our home, work, and childrearing responsibilities ebb and flow, but we always work together to figure out how to make sure our life is full of love, joy, and adventure.
And because we are constantly learning how to be together, how to love each other, how to support each other, our lives are never boring. It makes me look forward to the next twenty years with excitement!
Comments