Most men and women long to find a partner who is their soul mate…even if they don’t think that such a person exists outside of the imagination. Over the years, I’ve heard many of my patients describe their longing for a soul mate, and a few of them believe they were fortunate enough to find one. But most have concluded that it’s just an elusive dream, fueled by idealized illusions. And many of them have had to face how their longing for a soul mate drew them into relationships that ended up distorted or dysfunctional, partly because of their idealization of their partners.
Of course, one reason for that is the damaging impact of our adolescent model of adult love that I described in a previous post. Many people become socially conditioned into a view of love that they equate with an intense yearning for the feeling of being “in love.” That heightens desire for an idealized lover, especially when he or she is elusive or unavailable. Longing for the unattainable ideal is more of an enthrallment with your own experience of feeling in love, than a reality-based interest in the real person of your partner.
Beyond that flawed experience that colors most people’s romantic lives, many relationships that begin with a positive charge, emotionally and sexually, crumble under the weight of daily life, with all it’s pressures, conflicting desires, bills to pay, career conflicts, children’s needs, and so on. Therefore, many assume that boredom with your partner and the corresponding sexual decline is “inevitable.” And that can reactivate old yearnings or hope for a soul mate who might be out there, after all, beckoning you to a simple, pure, passionate love. Of course, that’s what leads many people into affairs – a subject I’ll go into in a later post.
But I think there’s another way to envisioning what the soul-mate experience is and how it can grow and develop, as part of a mature adult love relationship; something that’s attainable in reality. In essence, sustainable adult love blends together erotic desire, friendship, respect and support of each other’s growth and development — as independent, different human beings. Think of the way in which a new substance can arise from the joining of two separate elements, like water emerging from the coming together of hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly, adult love is the product of two self-sufficient, “non-needy” people. It’s more of an art that you practice and cultivate, not a set of techniques that you acquire from a how-to book.
So how do you build it? I think there are three sources of the adult version of a soul mate: what I call “radical transparency;” “words-into-actions;” and “good vibrations,” sexually-physically. Continue reading
