A couple months ago, I polled my Twitter followers for their thoughts on the concept of the “soulmate.” Being a largely non-monogamous bunch, many of them posited that it’s likely incorrect and even harmful to imagine there is only one person each of us is “meant to” “end up” with. When I was a kid, I swallowed Disney ideology hook, line, and sinker, and genuinely believed there was a fateful person out there, wandering the earth, looking for me as I looked for them – which seemed cosmically unfair, because statistically that person probably lived on another continent and maybe didn’t even speak English.
But at some point during my tumultuous teen years, I saw the movie Kissing Jessica Stein, and in addition to validating my burgeoning bisexuality, it gave me the gift of this line: “I don’t even believe [in soulmates] anymore. I don’t believe there’s just one person [for each of us]. I think there are, like, seven.”
This is a heartening concept even if you’re not polyamorous. It’s a comfort to know you could lose one soulmate – through death, distance, negligence, or any other trouble that can befall a relationship – and not have to give up on deep love forever. Plus, if we all have seven soulmates, then probably at least one of them lives within reach and speaks your language.
The most common quality my Twitter followers ascribed to a soulmate (or “great love,” if you want to be less woo-woo and more poly-inclusive) is that the two of you just “get” each other. You “click.” I’ve reflected a lot on this feeling each of the few times I’ve truly encountered it (which have been, it’s worth noting, mostly in platonic relationships and not romantic ones), and the oddest thing to me about how it touches my own life is that 3 of my 4 “great loves” were born and raised in the U.S., a country I didn’t set foot in until I was nine years old. Knowing what I know about social psychology, it seems strange that I would feel so deeply connected to people who don’t share many of my cultural touchstones, social identities, or formative experiences. But I suppose that just reinforces the apparently soul-deep link I had (and still have) with these people – we could come from starkly different backgrounds and still click into place like magnets as soon as we crossed paths.