Soul Mates

“I am not looking for a perfect man to get married to…but the one with flaws that I can compromise with!”

A friend made this statement this morning, who is currently in a process of checking out guys shortlisted by her parents, to get married to. This one statement stuck me so hard and made me write this blog, since it resonated exactly my thoughts. Incidentally, I happen to coincide with the idea that no living being on the face of this earth is perfect. Everybody would have their own set of short comings. But it’s for you to decide whether or not you can live with those flaws for the rest of your lives.

This explains why I do not have a list of how I want my "Mr. Right" to be, unlike most others out there. It is more than likely that you end up with someone completely opposite to the fictitious figure that appears in your check list. Or you may just loose out on your near "Perfect Mr./ Ms Right" just because you had been struck up too tight to your check list.

Speaking of perfect partners, we often say they people do eventually find their “soul mates” to spend their rest of their lives together. And this belief has its roots more than a thousand years back, when Plato- a classical Greek philosopher, gave his version of how this concept came into existence. In his dialogue The Symposium Plato has Aristophanes present a story about soul mates. Here goes the mythic story:

Aristophanes asserts that humans originally had four arms, four legs, and a single head made up of two faces. However, Zeus- the father of Gods and men (read Greek mythology), feared its strength and hegemony, so much so that he cut each one of them into halves. They were left randomly scattered on the Earth, proscribed to spend their lives in search of their other half, to complete them.

This theory is based on the belief that humans, on a subconscious level, realize that there is something missing in them and they seek the sense of completeness.

"All our young lives we search for someone to love. Someone who makes us complete. We choose partners & change partners. We dance to a song of heartbreak & hope…Wondering all the while if somewhere, somehow, there's someone perfect who might be searching for us".

Going by that logic, I think we should stop matching our ‘prospectives’ with the list of 'Must haves' that all of us have in our heads, somewhere deep down. Rather, see if you feel the sense of 'completeness' with that person, because as per Plato, that’s what the objective of our lives is…to seek wholeness.

Some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity!