The ‘he said, she said’ guide to dating rituals

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They say heaven knows ... so why not see what stars have in store for you today?

It’s tempting to conclude that I was mistaken, and that Katrina wasn’t my soul mate after all. That when it comes to soul mates, either love is blind, or my soul needed Lasik. Yet, there’s no denying that I was deeply in love with her, so looking back, I’ve come to the (albeit convenient) conclusion that Katrina was, in fact, my soul mate, but that there would be others as well.¹ Perhaps Katrina was simply my ideal soul mate when my soul mate needed to fall in love and have his heart broken — so that when the next soul mate comes along, my soul will know to prize her that much more. It may be delusional thinking, but it’s necessary for our sanity and therefore, just a little genius. After all, we hamstring ourselves when we believe we’ll only be happy with our perfect match, and conclude there’s no point in bothering with anyone who doesn’t measure up.² At the beginning of any soul mate search, it’s important to realize that those perfect-match soul mates are like truffles: rare, hard to come by, and perhaps overrated. That the more we keep our mind open, be open to new soul mates, and bounce around the Whitman’s Sampler of love, the more likely we’ll find something that satisfies. Try as we might to guarantee we won’t be disappointed by what we find, there’s no way of knowing if it’s what we were hoping for until we take a bite.

After all, I doubt when Alfred Stieglitz fell in love Georgia O’Keefe, he thought, “Gee, I’m really into southwestern artists with Irish names who paint vaginal flowers.”

I doubt Mary Matalin thought, “I’m really into snake-headed Cajuns who disagree with me.”

I doubt Soon-Yi thought, “I’m really into nebbishy curmudgeons twice my age who once dated my mom.”

And yet, they’ve found their soul mate, their “one true love.” Or at least something that gets them one step closer to their one true love.

Something like Katrina.

She Said ...

I know women who believe in a soul mate but not in God.

Never mind that saying “I want to find my soul mate” is a bit like saying, “I want to find my fairy godmother.” If you’re older than ten, you know there’s no fairy godmother, no Santa Claus, and no such thing as age-defying cosmetics. But from our very first princess-finds-her-prince story, women — Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Buddhists alike — are brainwashed to believe that soul mates exist. God, we’re not so sure about. After all, if there were a God, wouldn’t He have sent us our soul mate by now?

“There’s no evidence that God exists,” these women say.

Well, where’s the evidence that soul mates exist? We see people get married, divorced, and married again (and again), each time to the “love of their life.” We see people who stay married to their so-called soul mates, but tell you with no prompting how much they despise every fiber of his or her being. We’ve spent most of our adult lives sleeping next to men we say are our soul mates but who can’t even begin to fathom our souls.

And still, we’re looking in bars, on the Internet, at parties — we’re even scoping guys out at the office’s sexual harassment seminar — in hopes of finding our “one true love.” Meanwhile, we come up with all sorts of theories to explain why He (our soul mate, not God) hasn’t appeared yet.

An interior designer friend was sure that she hadn’t met her soul mate because everyone in her field was female or gay.

“My soul mate won’t know Herman Miller from Herman Munster,” she said, explaining that she “just knew” her soul mate — whom she had yet to meet — was a “guy’s guy.” At a particularly low point, she even considered changing careers (“I could do sports marketing”) right before meeting her current boyfriend, an architect, at a conference of, well, designers. Hallelujah, sister! I believe!

Another friend was convinced that geography separated her and her soul mate. “Maybe I haven’t found him because I’m in the wrong city,” she said. She even turned down Yale Medical School for a less prestigious one because, she told me, “I don’t think my soul mate is in a tiny town in Connecticut.” Well, it turns out he’s not in New York either. And now she’s got her MD from a third-rate medical school instead of Yale. (Oddly, she started going back to temple.)

The other day, I was flipping through my college alumni magazine and every person who announced their marriage wrote, “I finally found my soul mate!” After I finished gagging, I read their stories. Someone who met her husband online gushed, “It’s magical that we finally found each other!” Well, if it were so “magical,” why did they need to spend $24.99 a month on Match.com in order to hook up?

Sadly, my soul mate wasn’t on Match.com. Oh, several guys claimed to be my soul mate. But apparently my soul mates aren’t very photogenic and can’t spell. In the real world, when I’m attracted to someone, there’s an intensity between us that can mean only one of two things: either we’ll become soul mates (except there’s no such thing — see above), or we’ll rip each other’s souls out (there is such a thing — see chapters 27-32).

Other than that, it’s confusing. Once I thought a guy was my soul mate because we both ate the same brand of chocolate chip cookies — for breakfast. Instead, it just meant that we had terrible nutritional habits. Sometimes what you think is a spark really is a spark, but sometimes it’s just static electricity from your seamless bra rubbing up against your rayon tank top. Most times, it’s your unconscious zeroing in on the part of his unconscious that resembles the unconscious of the person who hurt you the most in your formative years. But instead of calling him “devil,” your unconscious calls him “soul mate.”

CONTINUED

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The ‘he said, she said’ guide to dating rituals