Judy Garland
I got an email a few days ago about a discussion a friend and I had two years ago. Pretty amazing that something I wrote could be profound to someone years later. I think the writing she is referring to is an interesting topic as well, definitely worthy of a blog post perhaps?
And even though its two years later thanks so much for sending this!!!!!! Its amazing how the friends in my life can have such positive impacts to my own..
good nite,
viv
On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 9:18 AM, Margaret Tong
I've spent the last week or so trying to write a paper assigned by my friend Matt after a dinner discussion in Berkeley (mon dieu, que j'aime Berkeley). During spare moments at work or late night writing fits, I have tried to work on this assignment. I have tried to define "soul mate" and "true love" and how they differ. I've taken on this subject at multiple angles, referring to everything from Romeo and Juliet to eHarmony, but always find myself writing more with intellect than emotion and with a topic like this, intellect isn't enough because love itself is not empirical. A cold, hard look at love the summer after freshman year made me wonder if love is just a mystical idea humans have formed to differentiate us from the animals; to make sex excusable and not just an act of evolution and animal instinct. (That argument alone could branch into many different arguments in regards to religion, fate, destiny, etc. So I'll try and focus on the task at hand.)
The problem with this belief is it starves the soul (although soul itself is in question if love can be argued) and makes life pretty difficult to bear when the magic of love is absent. So assuming love is real, therefore true love is possible, what is the difference between a true love and a soul mate? In true female form, I am throwing logic out the window and writing with emotion... (face it ladies, we think more with our hearts and souls, ignoring our fantastic brains... but our emotions are the key to the evolution of the human race... but that's another writing assignment. I digress...)
I have been trying to define a true love and a soul mate with multiple drafts and I haven't found a definition I feel comfortable with... mostly because I find my definitions in conflict because I keep overanalyzing. So, I'm basing my definitions on emotions, how we feel is the divide between the two.
Meeting a soul mate is like meeting yourself. You feel like you've known them forever and you feel like you know how they tick because your souls are one in the same. The formal french term for this is "moitie" which means half or less formally, ame soeur, which means soul sister because your souls were born together like sisters. The things in life that make soul mates angry, sad, happy, etc. are similar and the ways they react are similar. That person's soul is your soul's twin... Sometimes though, a soul mate won't walk through life with you forever. But their presence in your life might solely be to show you things about yourself you weren't aware of and help nourish your soul.
True loves on the other hand? True loves don't meet each other feeling they know everything about the other. They meet each other with the same blank slate that they meet everyone else except for maybe a spark of attraction. They don't know what makes the other person tick... not at first anyways. But as they learn more about each other and gravitate towards one another, they want to learn all these things about the other. They want to learn more about what makes a person tick, why they cry, laugh, get angry, etc. and they fall in love with all those things. True love is when they don't want to live without these things, these ticks and idiosyncrasies that others might judge. True love is without judgment, pure, and everlasting and sometimes full of sacrifice, compromise and hard work.
How many soul mates and true loves can a person have? I'm not sure... I think people only allow themselves one true love though. After they've endured the beauty and hardships and sacrifices of their first true love, it is too exhausting, too heartbreaking, and too difficult for the heart to recover from the loss of a true love to allow for another one. As for soul mates, I like to think a person can have multiple. Maybe one ultimate soul sister... and a couple soul cousins?
*****
As I was walking around work today doing my 2pm wake up laps, I thought about a man I met on my plane home from Spain and what we discussed true love was (I like having deep philosophical discussions with strangers). Anywho, in his drunken stupor he managed some very intelligent words...(shit hold on, gotta look in my journal where I quoted 26B...)
""When you're with someone," he leans in, far in, to my personal space, "and there's synergy, that's when things are good. When the two of you together are better than the sum of your parts, that's when it's good. That's when you should stay… It's when the other person is draining you, that's when it's bad. That's when it's time to pull out. It's about being strong on your own."
True love as quoted by a chianti-filled man... and I fully concur.
True love will inspire you to be a better person. A soul mate may have shared a soul from the same source but a true love is someone whose soul is going in the same direction...
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