Wuv, True Wuv

Because Sam and I celebrated an anniversary yesterday, I’ve been thinking about this whole concept of “soul mates.” On the one hand, it’s not true. People don’t have to sort through the seven billion potential partners on the planet in order to find deep and abiding love; they manage to do it with pretty much whatever selection is on hand. Widows and widowers remarry. People can have more than one great love in their lifetimes.

On the other hand, the longer I’m with Sam, the harder it becomes to imagine that anybody else could ever understand me so well or be so nice to live with. I think there’s a mechanism underlying long term relationships that kind of feeds into the soul mate myth. Basically, the longer two people spend together, the more they adapt to each other’s idiosyncrasies. They develop their own daily rituals, linguistic shorthands, cultural touchstones, in-jokes, and odd habits. They cover for each other’s weaknesses. They work around each other’s sore spots. Their lives become a shared island away from the rest of the society, and it becomes more and more difficult to imagine ever sharing that life with an “outsider.”

In short, people get weird when they spend a lot of time together. Every family is weird in one way or another. In fact families are more or less defined by their shared oddities. I think this might be part of what sustains the soul mate myth—we can look at old married couples and think, wow, it’s a good thing they found each other because nobody else would put up with that.

I guess what I’m saying is, I love you, sweetie. Let’s get weird together.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012 at 10:05 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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