On Soul Mates and Being Broken

by Tracey Flower

“Well, I like the word soul. I like the word mate. Other than that you got me.” ~Sex and the City’s Mr. Big on soul mates

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “soul mates” lately. In fact this post has been in the drafting stages for several months now, revised over and over while I try to figure out what this term means to me. It’s been swirling and tumbling around in my head with other equally weighty and abstract concepts like fate and destiny. I’m not totally sure why it’s so important to me to define this phrase (blame it on trying to make sense of my heartache) but I think I’m slowly starting to figure it out (blame it on the six months of distance I now have from the day my heart was broken).

(Photo Credit)

I have to start by telling you I don’t believe there is one and only one person out there for everyone; I don’t believe in the idea of The One. I always sort of suspected I felt this way but it’s such a happy little idea and I’ve certainly found myself swept up in the romance of it from time to time but after having friend after well-meaning friend tell me The Guy (who broke my heart) just wasn’t The One I got fed up.

I believe in love. I believe in great love. I believe in marriage and that it can and does last forever (thank you to my grandparents and parents for providing me with excellent examples of this). I also believe in timing and other crazy twisted upside down circumstances that sometimes lead to the end of great love, love that in a different time or place, under different circumstances, would have most certainly lasted forever. I believe that you just don’t get to spend forever with everyone you love and that you can truly madly deeply love someone forever and not spend forever with that person (and still have oodles of love left for the someone you are spending forever with).

And as far as soul mates go, I do think they exist, just not in the traditional sense (as The One).

I think The Guy was my soul mate. Yes I did think I was going to marry him (in fact I was sure of it until the moment he told me, once and for all, that I wasn’t), but that’s not why he was my soul mate. I believe I was meant (ok, destined) to meet him, I believe he was always supposed to come into my life and that, all along, I was going to fall in love with him. And I believe it was always going to, one way or another, end tragically.

There’s a passage in the book Eat, Pray, Love (by Elizabeth Gilbert) that helped me come to this conclusion. It goes like this:

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.

BINGO.

When The Guy ended our relationship forever (just hours before I was supposed to get on a plane bound for Sydney to live with him) it crushed me and turned my world upside down. It brought me to my knees, hell it sucked the wind out of me and had me curled up breathless on the floor. I’ve never been so broken in my life.

Once I caught my breath I realized that the thing I thought had certainly killed me, in fact, hadn’t. I slowly lifted myself off the floor and started moving forward again. Since then I have tripped, stumbled and fallen down again. But six months have gone by and I’m still alive. I hate the pain this has brought to my life, I hate how exhausting it is and that it’s not quite gone yet. But I can’t deny that I’ve grown. I can’t deny that I’ve changed or that I’m quite sure I’m becoming someone, that I have become someone, I never would be had I not met, fallen in love with and been so very broken by The Guy.

And that’s the point. Just as muscle has to be broken down by strength training in order to grow stronger, sometimes we must be torn and cracked open emotionally and mentally so we can strengthen those parts of ourselves.  We better ourselves during life's rough patches, we need these tough times to survive and thrive just as our muscles need exercise to do the same.

Some people come into our lives, shake us up, break us down and then, as my friend Neil would say, disappear into the night like a winter wind. I believe these people are our soul mates.

I also believe there are more dimensions and definitions to this weighty phrase and I’ll most certainly continue to muddle through and explore them here. In the meantime what do you think about soul mates?

Why Melbourne? Why Now? (From Flower Blog Two: Stories From Down Under)

Total time it took to get from South Haven, Michigan to Melbourne, Australia (including time spent in airports): approximately 33 hours.

Total extra money spent to get me and my very heavy bags from South Haven, Michigan to Melbourne, Australia (including fees for changing my original flight, booking a flight from Sydney to Melbourne, and excess baggage fees): approximately 600 dollars. (Apparently you can bring your baggage with you to Australia but it will cost you).

Seeing the Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge at dawn from the plane: well, not quite priceless, given the hours, dollars, and heartache it took to get me here, but pretty spectacular nonetheless.

Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge

It was that moment, in fact, when it first hit me where I was and what I was doing. It was that moment, when the plane turned a little to the left and I strained to see the view out of the tiny airplane window, that this adventure I’m living became real and was no longer just a foggy dream. It was after hours and hours of sitting on a plane in the very back row; after hours of fitful sleep spent still wrestling with the decision I’d made to come to Australia despite my change in plans, I realized I had arrived and, even if it was a decision I was still unsure about, I had no choice but to go through with it. As I followed the masses through customs and the baggage claim, though, the only thought my sleep-deprived brain could manage was, what the hell am I doing here?

I have been here a little over three days now. I’m settled into a cute townhouse in a really cool neighborhood called Richmond. And, yes, I realize describing it as “really cool” sounds a little lame but when I was walking around the other day trying to get a feel for the place, all I could think is how cool it is. There are shops and trains and cafes all within a short walking distance from my house, and for a gal who grew up in a small resort town, went to college in a corn field, and then moved to another small resort town, this kind of neighborhood is, well, just plain cool. I’m excited to be here, I’m excited to be somewhere so new, so cool. Still, though, that thought keeps surfacing, keeps plaguing me; what the hell am I doing here?

I can never decide if I believe in the concepts of fate or destiny. Sometimes I think they’re just ideas dreamed up by the romantics out there and they’re happy little thoughts but not totally realistic. But there are some times, like right now, when I find myself clinging to the hope that they must exist. I still feel like my life isn’t my own at the moment, like the real me is floating over this strange life and the only place I can find footing is in the idea that there must be some reason why I have found myself in this place at this time.

So I’m wondering what do you, my lovely readers, think about the concepts of fate or destiny? Do things really happen for a reason? When your life is turned upside down and sideways and spits you out in a direction you had no intention of going in, is there a reason for it? Or is that just something we tell ourselves to cope with change?