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**Animal** · 11-11-2019, 06:25 PM

I want to share an old post from several years ago, before I met my soulmate - although I had met friends who were non-romantic soulmates, and had been deeply in love and heartbroken, long ago. I will update my thoughts soon.
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05-17-2014

When we meet someone who stirs us to the core, we feel vulnerable. Then we will go to great lengths to protect ourselves, even do stupid things, or things that are inadvertently cruel. Even the most reasonable, dignified, respectful person will falter when feeling vulnerable. The eyes of a soul mate unravel you, make you feel naked. When your humanity is exposed, your animal instinct is to protect it.

If you've been perfect in romance, and treated your partners perfectly, you haven't loved. You haven't confronted your humanity. If you confront this only in private, you haven't made yourself vulnerable to someone else. To make yourself vulnerable to someone else is to expose your weaknesses, fears, shame and rage, bare for them to see. To accept theirs in turn. To follow them to the darkest, most frightening, torturous corners of their psyche. Mentally, this is to dive into lava and tornadoes, to stand naked in a snowstorm, to follow them into the void, to their fear of death, to their childhood traumas, just to be with them, so they won't be alone there. To open yourself up to chance; to surrender control.

After experiencing various levels of surrender and openness, one may feel that a soul mate truly knows them, and has seen them bare. There may be love, honesty and mutual acceptance. Ideally that would be the case in any relationship or friendship. But what separates a soulmate from the regular companion or lover is that a "soul mate" would not be dependent on a relationship. It is an unbreakable bond. It just is. A soul mate just is. You can fight as hard as you want to break the bond, you can walk away for years, you can marry someone else, you can deny it to the skies, but still, your soul mate just IS. To use a word like "soul," one implies transcendence of desire, lust, and fear. Of course, those human elements are real and will never disappear, but when we truly accept and recognize a soul mate, the bond is beyond that. Frustrations and fear of loss will be there, but the outcome becomes irrelevant because the soul is stirred by something beyond. In recognizing a soul mate, we recognize ourselves, here and now. The synchronicity between you will push you both to grow, just as watching yourself in the mirror pushes you to pose in a more beautiful way. If your mirror had an emotional reaction, posing would not be enough. You would work out, eat right, care for your skin and hair, change your lifestyle just for that smile. The difference is, for a "soul mate," this person mirrors your innards. Your mind, your soul, your humanity.

When someone sees you, watches you, unravels you, exposes you; you want to give, to grow, to be better in order to inspire that person, because you will see yourself through their eyes. You will never wonder whether that person is doing it for you in return, because it just is; expressing yourself to this person is being true to yourself, and it feels natural. Giving them anything less than your all feels unnatural; it feels like trying to stand still while the tide is pushing against you. Most people will do this for some time, resisting the forces of nature to try to feel like they are in control, to feel a sense of free will, to take a stand. But once you have recognized and accepted that you have met your soul mate, and grown enough to surrender to that force, you work with the tide without losing your own will. Your will is the will of the world. Giving your all is a natural process of revelation and growth, and all that matters is that this process is happening. It is honest, true; it is now, and it is infinity. With or without labels, commitments, sex, promises, or expectation, it simply is.

The trials and tribulations of corporeal life cannot touch something that is truly sacred. But we cannot recognize what is truly sacred until we, ourselves, have evolved. To recognize something greater than ourselves requires humility. Meeting a soul mate is not an easy, happy ride. It is a life changing experience that digs up all of our demons and fears, and forces us to face our humanity.

**Vive** · 11-11-2019, 09:11 PM

Originally posted by RALA View Post

And so I've always found myself growing a certain type of hatred for every man that has claimed to love me. They were all so... human, so pure, so perfectly constructed on the inside. I knew as soon as they would get a chance to look closely and see me for the creature I really am, they would run and never look back. They never got a chance, I always ran first. Rejection would have been an unbearable confirmation of what I already knew, and so I've always gone to ridiculously great lengths to avoid it. I am far too weak to look that kind of level of death in the eye.

I wonder. Can you really see into someone else's depth if you're not truly willing to expose your own? Perhaps you're right in that people can't really see what's inside, maybe you should expose the side of you deem unlovable to those who deem to love you, so you can truly put your belief to the test. I'm not saying it is easy, hell no, it's tough, but I think it's really the only way to verify whether someone will love the real you.

Volcana

If you've been perfect in romance, and treated your partners perfectly, you haven't loved. You haven't confronted your humanity. If you confront this only in private, you haven't made yourself vulnerable to someone else. To make yourself vulnerable to someone else is to expose your weaknesses, fears, shame and rage, bare for them to see. To accept theirs in turn. To follow them to the darkest, most frightening, torturous corners of their psyche. Mentally, this is to dive into lava and tornadoes, to stand naked in a snowstorm, to follow them into the void, to their fear of death, to their childhood traumas, just to be with them, so they won't be alone there. To open yourself up to chance; to surrender control.

Beautiful. I think the real beauty in life is in it's vulnerability, messiness and it's pain. When somebody opens up to you about that and you to them and all of this pain, messiness and vulnerability is shared and lived through, we open up a path to an almost boundless, empathetic and visceral understanding of each other.

After experiencing various levels of surrender and openness, one may feel that a soul mate truly knows them, and has seen them bare. There may be love, honesty and mutual acceptance. Ideally that would be the case in any relationship or friendship. But what separates a soulmate from the regular companion or lover is that a "soul mate" would not be dependent on a relationship. It is an unbreakable bond. It just is. A soul mate just is. You can fight as hard as you want to break the bond, you can walk away for years, you can marry someone else, you can deny it to the skies, but still, your soul mate just IS. To use a word like "soul," one implies transcendence of desire, lust, and fear. Of course, those human elements are real and will never disappear, but when we truly accept and recognize a soul mate, the bond is beyond that. Frustrations and fear of loss will be there, but the outcome becomes irrelevant because the soul is stirred by something beyond. In recognizing a soul mate, we recognize ourselves, here and now. The synchronicity between you will push you both to grow, just as watching yourself in the mirror pushes you to pose in a more beautiful way. If your mirror had an emotional reaction, posing would not be enough. You would work out, eat right, care for your skin and hair, change your lifestyle just for that smile. The difference is, for a "soul mate," this person mirrors your innards. Your mind, your soul, your humanity.

I think it's spot on. My girlfriend just has this pull on me and I don't just mean that romantically or just sexually. I met her through studying Japanese on an app. Even though initially her English was hard to follow and it was hard to communicate and barely could talk in Japanese. I remember even having headaches, because of how much time my brain spent on processing everything. Somehow she stuck around. The first time we actually met only happened, because of very fortunate circumstances. Even if we didn't talk for a while we would always keep in tune every so often at least.

I somehow just knew, I knew I should go for it. It felt right every step of the way. It was terribly scary and required me to be vulnerable, but once I confessed my feelings, she said she feels a sense of relief when with me, even though technically we had only known each other for a small while. She allows me to lead her, but she can also tell when I need to be led by her. I've been longing for the experience I'm having with her for quite some time now. She's very similar to me, and yet different, unpredictable and quite crazy. She has accepted even the parts I am most ashamed of and I have accepted her. It's a long distance relationship for now, but I have no doubts that we will make it through. I love her too much not to.

**RALA** · 11-12-2019, 05:28 PM

Vive

I think no matter how I approach this, it will end up in disaster. The best thing for me to do is work on the issues I have because I won't be able to let anyone prove to me that I can be loved, there is a part of me that will always go to great lengths to drive them away and prove to myself and them that I was right, that I told them so.

**[redacted]** · 11-19-2019, 02:47 PM

I do not believe in soul mates -- though you can often tell if someone is "right" for you fairly early, I think it has less to do with fate and more to do with things like pheromones and on a more emotional level being honest with yourself about what you need and want from a relationship to be fulfilled -- but then there's the fact that I don't like the idea of fate in general.

I suppose I feel like I'm not meant for just one person... Not that I want to be with more than one person at a time but I feel like there can be different people I have potential with, that I could explore things with and we would have different dynamics that each could yield something interesting (good or bad whether than matters on a soul-level). Although it's ironic because right now I'm rather obsessed with one person I can't have and it's hard to imagine that I could fall for someone else. However, I don't even feel like we are soulmates, my mind just got really entangled with this one idea and now nothing else seems interesting enough in comparison.

**vermilionplum** · 11-28-2019, 10:55 PM

subjective to yourself, you can be sure to love others, and that's probably the only thing that you can be sure to experience
the same applies to the other party
and thus, the experience of a soulmate occurs when both parties, through their perceptions, imagine the ideal of each other's love felt towards the other while loving each other, similar to binary stars. sounds delusional but when the perception of the other person's love matches the actual love subjectively felt by the other, maybe that's a soulmate experience.

**PleasureToBurn** · 12-07-2019, 06:15 AM

I feel the same way actually. They get close and then they either cheat or they leave. I'd like to believe in soul mates, I think it's a very romantic notion, but at the end of the day I think I'm just way too cynical to believe in it. It doesn't stop me from falling for peiple, but I'm hesitant to let anyone get close which then turns it into a self fulfilling prophecy. When someone tells me that they love me, I'm thinking, just give it time. You'll leave to, just like all the rest of them. I want to be with you forever. I'll always love you. I'm always your baby. It's all bullshit. Give it time. The only thing that's certain is that we'll both let each other down and hurt each other.

**Melon2790** · 10-26-2020, 03:41 AM

Hi! so im going to try to take this part by part.

I have always believed it would take a very special kind of freak to truly love me. (same) I was never able to believe it in the depth of my soul whenever a man claimed to love me. (SAME) To me, that immediately translated to ''I don't truly know you," because if he did, how could he have loved me? (YESSS) My core was inherently unlovable. (omg i feel the same) IS inherently unlovable. I believe this is my biggest curse; the inherent and stubborn belief that my core is far too alien and foreign for anyone to be able to love. (okay ill analyze this later, im hoping i do not step on toes, im only offering my experience, which you do not have to listen to) Cut from a totally different material, incompatible with any other soul on this planet, in this world, in this fucking universe where I happened to "land."

And so I've always found myself growing a certain type of hatred for every man that has claimed to love me. (i can elaborate more on this) They were all so... human, so pure, so perfectly constructed on the inside. I knew as soon as they would get a chance to look closely and see me for the creature I really am, they would run and never look back. They never got a chance, I always ran first. Rejection would have been an unbearable confirmation of what I already knew, and so I've always gone to ridiculously great lengths to avoid it. I am far too weak to look that kind of level of death in the eye.
(im glad i found someone i relate to on this level, and i appreciate you being this open about it)

And so I've been spending my life running, leaving ruins behind me that don't even haunt me because, yet again, I am too weak to care. And way too bitter. For chances are that special kind of freak might not have traveled so far away from home like I did, and right now he might be thousands of light years away from me.

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Your hook, although slightly connected to your comment, was less interesting then the content presented. (its 200% not a bad thing, but rather a statement i felt the need to send out there)
So i don't know what lead to this fear of yours, but for me, it was a result of being unaware of the relations around me to the point where i was out-casted at a young age and criticized (kind and unkindly) when i didn't know how to parse that information yet. (i am not looking for sympathy here, this is an important point to lead to my conceptualization of this inherent fear that I hold). Due to these issues, i had tried to observe the irrational societal mind of these people and had come up with the rather harsh idea of a "deal" among people. People have an idea of other people, know that person based on different things and perceptions of the situation, they start keeping track of what they can benefit from you or value/disvalue from you and take into account what the public says. Their indicator of of that is slightly random but also slightly veered towards interests. In that way, you provide something for a certain person and that person provides something for you. When you run out of things to provide or the things you do provide are negligible compared to what you burden them with, at some point, they see no value in you any more. This deal goes both ways and if they left, than that was completely understandable. I ran my life living this idea in the back of my head.

If you run your life doing this, it often becomes clear to you to an extent what role you play for others and how much you can demonstrate your different interests to them with out crossing boundaries. And yet, there is still that inherent fear, that inherent wrongness, that i atleast carried around me everywhere. For me, that was because i wasn't providing a part of myself to them i believed they truly valued, but i valued it. Not only that, but even if i had shown most of my values to the person, there was still this insecure childish side of me (that everyone has) that was afraid to ever make a mistake, for fear it would make my value negligible.

The moment you go into a relationship, this system can break to an extent or you could try overthinking it. I did both. Just like in a normal relationship, most people still demonstrate actions they do in friendships, such as falling into an archetype they believe may not encompass them or going into that archetype maybe 60% of the time. As they go further and further with this person (it obviously) becomes more difficult to hide that "insecure childish side" and so there comes a point where someone is faced with the question "its not like i can hide this side of me forever. Is it worth it to show him/her? is he/she worth it? And some will try to tread the line, some will run, and some will face the fear. From your post, which is all i have to go off of, you run. I treaded the line for a while. When faced with someone who loves and cares about me, whether it be my sister or my boyfriend, ive always tried to find a justification to save me from this pain or save me from accepting the idea that no matter what i do i will still be accepted. And in today's society, its sooooo easy to find a justification "oh its their obligation to the family duty" "he's being overtaken by his hormones" "he's too comfortable and he's afraid to leave me." It also doesn't help that people/along with me (and maybe you) use these as justifications for why we stayed long in a past relationship. Are they valid? maybe in that situation. Are they applicable? its safer to think they are. Maybe you feel the same, maybe you don't. But I think i know why that pain of accepting that someone loves you is so scary. It breaks the system. It tempts you to think that maybe you can let loose and the world wont break around you or (_____ insert past experience x here) around you (past experience x for me was the out-casting and the fear that everything i do will be wrong, or i cant be accepted at my current state). Many usually fall into a self destructive nature (i did). not only that but with the two way deal, it leaves you questioning what you need from the person as well. (the idea "is he an addiction to me?" "am i being healthy")

And i think what relationships do, for real is demonstrate the fatal flaw in what the structure of this system (that i atleast constructed, maybe you didn't). Despite what you think is important about you and what they think is important, you can never know what they are thinking completely about you, The more you try to figure out their indicator, the more you are actually coming face to face with duality. The idea of a completely different perception of you and appreciation of you that you have to learn to grapple with and the idea that what they state isn't all encompassing of what you are to them. As what they mean to you isn't completely conscious either.

Its also the idea that you don't know yourself. A human blinks and he breathes. If that person blinked one time and it caused fear inside of them for some unknown reason, they are more likely to be aware of the fact that they blink rather than the fact that they breathe. They may know they do, but they don't know to what extent they do. Despite you having the most experience with you, you still don't know you. This goes into what a person is and that's another thing, but what i'm trying to get at is who you are isn't completely defined by that insecure childish part of you. As much control as people believe they have, when they aren't aware of the fact that they "breath" (metaphor that i outlined earlier), they continue to do it.

rebuttles:
One may say that the aspect is continued because it is socially acceptable and therefore does not need to go to light, but that idea completely overhauls the fact that you don't know yourself and that maybe "breathing" is an issue for someone else that you just dont know any more. And living a life afraid of this pain is going to continually grow and grow until that fear and pain completely control you. This avoidance has actually been proven via studies. exposure therapy exists because people have over amplified the fear so much and tried to avoid it so much that the experience itself doesnt match the fear that they have constructed towards it. Exposing ones-self to that idea and that fear helps bring back a realistic worldview. "oh that wasn't that scary." Im also assuming that a lot of people would rather do it with someone they see as more stable than an unstable one later in the future.

One may also say that there are aspects of you that no one in society likes, to an extent. Everybody has that though, the common idea behind that is to make sure everyone builds a tolerance towards it to an extent and the person with that issue learns more about that instead of just diminishing it.

One may also say im promoting self stagnation, i think change is good and avoidance is not always change. And i had to learn that the hard way with my current boyfriend (im very sorry if i was mean during this or patronizing. pls let me know if i was).

I actually tried self stagnation... i became everything i hated in myself because it was so frustrating to hide myself and not know (and i dont know if i did this deliberately of subconsciously) and yet he kept doing what a general person who cares would do trying to help and getting frustrated, not based on his judgement of how i should be but how he wanted me to be healthy. people have their limits, its true. but at the end of the day i realized i wasnt happy being that person, so i changed.

going back full circle:
so with all this analysis in place... that may or may not apply to you (IM SO SORRY ABOUT THE RANT) i don't think there is a "soul-mate" more a partner that can help you with that duality and that initial fear as well as you help them with themselves as well.

again my story is not yours, and I STILL struggle heavily with this issue. Im not some sort of saint, i just felt like expressing my thoughts on this

if by chance you did struggle with this, I think you are perfectly fine, and even if you went into this issue (and maybe i'm saying this just cause i struggled with it too) you are still okay and your universal value (by universal i mean one that is not dependent on a single person but an all encompassing idea of you that no one has) doesn't diminish

also not shaming anyone here, but i generally disagree that one cannot be loved if they are hiding parts of themselves to others. it becomes clear that even as much as they try to hide, they cant completely. And it 20000% should not even a judgement that is applied. such as "this is the sector of people that can be loved and this is the sector that cant because they aren't open." Its just going to take some struggle, and every relationship has that

**Quindary** · 10-30-2020, 10:31 PM

Soulmates exist, and they are a tough tangle. I'm with Animal on this one. If you are with someone and it's just romantic, pleasant, and does not evoke any difficulty at all, it's not your soulmate.. because we are all imperfect, we are all here to grow, and perhaps the surest way to do that is through the intimate relationship that touches your soul - as long as you're paying attention and dealing with the things that come up.

But I'll also say that soulmates may also take growth to truly find or work toward. The other relationships and intimate experiences in your life can, if you make the effort to work through them, help you grow to the endpoint where you can have and find the soul mate you were looking for. It's an organic process if you are so pointed - and it grows on itself.

**inkreservoir** · 09-22-2021, 11:50 PM

I feel like there's two conversations going on here but I'll be talking specifically to the bit on soulmates ^^ I do believe in soulmates but I'm not sure I agree with some of the above opinions about them (though I might be misreading!) I feel like when it comes to difficulties faced by soulmates the difficulty doesn't need to come from the relationship itself? Each person coming into the relationship is going to have their own issues and battles they're fighting, I think part of the point is to fight them together, and sometimes those issues are going to directly affect the relationship and make it hard and even make staying together seem hard... but if the point being made is that soulmates must cause difficulty for each other then I don't agree with that at all. Not that I don't think it's possible but I definitely don't think it's a requirement. Idk I might also be reading it from an overly strict definition of what causing difficulty for someone would mean... if I'm misunderstanding something let me know!

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