Hans Christian King on Soul Mate Friends and Soul Mate Lovers
In most of those encounters, people are headed in different directions. There's a pause, a moment of recognition, and then everyone keeps walking. Our culture carries a mistaken idea about soul mate relationships, and it's one I keep returning to in the hope of clearing it up. Take a mother, for example. You might have been a mother yourself in an earlier life, and the two of you came back together to work through something that stayed unfinished.
Some people, Erik, land in families that have no clue who they really are. None whatsoever. They spend years puzzled about why they ended up where they did. I've sat with thousands of them. Not a figure of speech, thousands. They describe a sense of not belonging, something close to the character Mr. Cellophane in the Broadway show 'Chicago.' Others look straight through them. People pass by without registering that they're even in the room.
There was a statistic on television the other day: half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce. Part of why that keeps happening, Erik, comes down to the relationships we lean on most. After family and friends in the ordinary sense, we have two main bonds, soul mate friends and soul mate lovers. Here's the trap. At the start, the two feel almost identical.
So when your heart lurches for somebody, the instinct kicks in right away: this is the one, I've found him, I've found her. Often that read is wrong. What you've actually run into is an old soul mate friend, someone you were close with across earlier lifetimes, and now the two of you have crossed paths again. Trying to marry that person is where the trouble starts. I teach several classes on telling a soul mate friend apart from a soul mate lover precisely so people can sidestep that mess.
Erik: That's wonderful. In your view, how does a person actually learn to tell the two apart?
Hans: Start with time. Back in my own day, which was quite a while ago now, meeting someone meant you let things unfold slowly. It could run a couple of months before anything went past a kiss. You learned who the person really was, and inside that process you could tell whether they were a soul mate friend or a soul mate lover. That habit is mostly gone. These days the message is that if you haven't paired off by 17 or 18, something must be wrong with you. Maybe you're not attractive enough, who can say. Something's broken. There are whole TV programs built around that panic, this push to get everybody matched up and married off instead of simply taking the time to know the person in front of you.