Some people believe that there are such things as soul mates. Souls trapped in the bodies of the living who seek out one another to live a life of love until they die. I like the idea, but I also like the idea of the Easter Bunny. How awesome would that be if there was a bunny dedicated to giving everyone chocolate eggs every year?

If we really had soul mates, people would search for them until they found them. I mean seriously. Your soul mate. The person that completes you. How could you spend your time fornicating with women and men of loose morals when your cosmic twin is out there just waiting for you?

And why, if you had a soul mate, would they so often be incarnated hundreds of miles from where you live, but handily as the right gender, ethnicity and with an acceptable belief system your incarnation happens to find attractive?

Interesting that souls can't work out how to get incarnated together in some sort of close proximity, but still manage to darn near always pick bodies desirable to their soul mate's body. It's pretty rare that a hot young guy or gal comes home with a racist, bigoted seventy year old homeless man or woman with severe PSTD and body odor and claims that they found their soul mate.

If we had soul mates, we wouldn't be so damn shallow. We wouldn't have a hard time with gay marriage. We wouldn't care about the creed or the color or the name or the fact that they gambled all their money away on seahorse races, or that their favorite meal was fluffy kitten stew. We'd love them and be with them no matter how awful and unattractive they were. But this isn't how we behave.

Of course, some people do believe in soul mates and they either:

A) Pick someone and eventually marry them happily declaring that they have found 'the one' (only to have a 50/50 chance of later proclaiming that he or she was actually the one who stole their youth and left them sleeping in a car,) or

B) Spend a long time being chaste and pure.

In essence, experience does not back up the soul mate theory one bit. It's an incredibly romantic thing to say about someone or to someone or to think about someone, but then you break up with them and you have to rationalize it one of three ways.

Either:

A) you just broke up with your soul mate for all eternity – in which case, boy, did you mess up,

or

B) You have more than one soul mate (a rationalization so handy as to be a cop out,)

or

C) There's no such things as soul mates, just souls and it is up to you to become mates with those souls.

So What Is There, If Not Soul Mates?

I believe that people with similar needs and or views who find each other physically attractive occasionally bump in to one another and as long as one of them doesn't say something monumentally stupid in the first hour or so of knowing one another, and they've both been single long enough to start craving the companionship of a mate, there is a fairly decent chance that they'll form a relationship.

Once they form a relationship (a heterosexual one, because that's all I really know about,) then they'll muddle along getting to know one another and bonding over shared experiences, growing closer together until they have become so much a part of one another's lives that for one to live without the other would be heartbreaking. This version takes a lot more work and doesn't have the blessing of the cosmos, but I think it's a great deal more real.