Soulmates forever?

Shakespeare: I will write a 3-day love story between young horney teens. Oh, and six people die.

There’s a problem with the idea of soulmates. When we’re 13 or 17 or 25, everything seems possible. Life seems to have no boundaries. Whatever quirks or personality differences we have with the other seem insignificant when you’re young. You don’t believe you’ll ever be 30, 40 or, god forbid, 50!

Every solid relationship, regardless of what kind it is, requires two people who can communicate efficiently and effectively, and someone must be grounded and relatively stable mentally. Is that even possible anymore in a world so unstable? Just staying stable in your own head is hard enough. Trying to intertwine that with another person seems nearly impossible. I’m not saying it never happens, just the probabilities of success seem almost impossible today.

Wow, do I sound like a cynic or what? Maybe I am. I’ve been there, and when I finally had to let him go, I had panic attacks that put me in the ER more than once. I lost 20 pounds in 2 months and I only weighed 118 when I started. I was so thin I had no ass fat. It was hard to sit on hard surfaces. My butt hurt. That sounds funny now, but it wasn’t at the time. I grieved him for years because I knew we were soulmates. He knew we were soulmates. He continued to tell me that two years after I let him go, but his demons were so powerful he could not overcome them.

It’s easy to fall in love when you’re young, but with each year that passes an unfortunate thing happens. You grow up and it’s an unwelcome punch in the face that’s likely to leave permanent scars. Things in your head change. Things outside of you change. The world changes. Your friends change. Everything changes and that person you thought was the love of your life — you both swore for years you were soulmates — isn’t emotionally available anymore.

It’s almost impossible in a world so full of chaos to be a grounded, sturdy, mentally stable person yourself. We are all the result of whatever happened before, but somehow around our late-twenties, the past and the future collide. What you thought was real at 18 becomes a fantasy at 28. There comes a time to let go. No one wants to hear this and no one believes they can live through it.

There is a psychology, a behavioral science behind this. We are so afraid of our own demons that we push away the people we love the most. Why do we do this? Perhaps we love them too much to let them see or touch who we really are. We don’t love ourselves enough. We don’t trust ourselves to love someone else. It goes like this:

You wind up alone because you’re afraid to be alone.

The only solace, if it’s even possible to call this a solace: At least you loved enough to hurt.