Spirits are a funny topic...

After not having blogged for quite some time, and having had many interesting conversations with people I see every day, some of whom I have the highest regard for, a topic of discussion has thrown itself upon me, like a sheet over the Holy Ghost.
The topic is a touchy one, and is decidedly multi-faceted, like a great disnub dirhombidodecahedron (204 faces, for those who care).

Tho topic is love, and relationships, and marriage, and soul mates, and whether or not the possibility exists that there is some one person out there who is perfect for each of us in every way, and that it's just a matter of finding them.

I don't know that I subscribe to that belief.

I don't think there is that one perfect person who fits exactly with you. I think it's much more about finding someone who affects you in such a way (makes you feel so happy, so excited, so aggravated, so tense, so much different than normal everyday life, which, for most of us, tends to be quite boring, actually) that you can overlook everything you don't like about them (or possibly even adapt to liking those things because they're familiar and reassuring), and are able to focus on that spectacular, insane feeling you get from being near them, from talking to them, or thinking about them.

Which is not to say I don't believe in fate. There are some things that when they happen, just feel perfect, and wouldn't be right any other way, such as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In time, the first four notes are three eighth notes and a half note (with fermata), or short-short-short-long. When represented on paper we see the motif dot-dot-dot-dash, which happens to be Morse code for the letter V, which doubles as the Roman numeral 5.

Or, for another, less impressive example: I started writing this blog about soul mates after drinking a piña colada my friend made for me. When most people think about piña coladas they think about the Rupert Holmes song, "Escape (the Piña Colada Song)," which is about a man who, bored with his wife, answers a personal ad which happens to have been placed by his wife. They both learn they have more in common than they knew before, but that doesn't prove that they're soul mates, or that soul mates even exist.

It's just a song.

But people still think of love as this fairy-tale thing, and from that we get phrases like "love at first sight," "true love," and "when it's right, you'll know," which are really kind of bullshit, and are going to infect our country and future generations with false ideals which in turn will cause catastrophic psychological unrest. Because in truth love comes from spending hours on end with someone, not from seeing them once and liking what they look like. And sometimes even when it is right you don't know, and lose everything. And there is no "true love." Because all love is true while you have it, but there is no guarantee that everything will stay even remotely okay. I will concede (purely to be reassuring) that we can and do observe couples for whom love appears pure, and it does seem that they have found each other in a world full of people. But we can't forget that we only see the tip of the iceberg, and a lot goes on behind the scenes. I would wager my life that they work at their relationship every bit as hard as the rest of us do, that aren't just fed life with silver spoons. Just because we perceive ease and spectacular connection doesn't mean there aren't some things they disagree about, some fights they just can't avoid.

It's just not possible for two people out of six billion seven hundred million to be perfectly suited to each other. The odds that two people could think that much alike with all the different lives we lead, and experiences we have are staggering. And the odds that those two people, everything considered, could have been raised in the same town, or even that they would meet at some point in their lives, are so enormous. And to think that they could somehow learn enough about each other to learn that they're perfectly matched is ridiculous.

There has to be more involved than that.