A poem from the 16th century, a sphere with two heads, four arms, and four legs, and the romance of Disney.
This week we talk about soulmates.
This is the second in a ten-part series on learning to love the Lord (and our neighbor) with all our soul. The soul is that part of you that is eternal. After death, after life, all you will be left with is your soul to carry on into eternity. If you don’t learn to love with all your soul, you won’t have any love left when life is over.
"Remember, you are loved, so go, love better!"
New episodes drop on Tuesdays.
A poem from the 16th century, a sphere with two heads, four arms, and four legs, and the romance of Disney.
This week we talk about soulmates.
This is the second in a ten-part series on learning to love the Lord (and our neighbor) with all our soul. The soul is that part of you that is eternal. After death, after life, all you will be left with is your soul to carry on into eternity. If you don’t learn to love with all your soul, you won’t have any love left when life is over.
"Remember, you are loved, so go, love better!"
New episodes drop on Tuesdays.
Amongst the narrow walkways and canals of Venice, a small publishing house, published a Jewish poem attributed to, eh-lah-ZAHR ben MOH-sheh ah-zee-KREE, in the year of our Lord, 1588. The poem, entitled Yedid Nefesh or “Friend of the Soul” is buried within a larger work, but it is liturgical – meaning it is meant to be recited regularly. In this case, regularly recited as part of a modern Jewish Sabbath meal. By many practicing Orthodox Jews, this tiny poem is recited every Saturday before nightfall as they gather around the dinner table.
The opening words are, “Beloved of the soul, the Father of compassion, draw your servant to your will.” That term, “beloved of the soul” attributed to God, is sometimes translated “soul’s friend”… and eventually has led to the more modern term being borrowed from it – soulmate.
I’m Scott Beyer and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone along the way.
This is the second in a ten-part series on learning to love the Lord (and our neighbor) with all our soul. The soul is that part of you that is eternal. After death, after life, all you will be left with is your soul to carry on into eternity. If you don’t learn to love with all your soul, you won’t have any love left when life is over.
This series is part of a broader goal this year to learn to love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Jesus says that learning to love God and our neighbor with these four parts of us are the two greatest commandments. There is no better way to love better than to try and figure out how to best fulfill the first and second commandments.
The term soulmate may trace its way back to a 16th century Jewish liturgy, but the idea of soulmates certainly goes back much further than that. The Greek Philosopher, Plato, posited the idea that the gods had originally made men and women as one spherical unit – like one perfect circle of humanity, but in their typically capricious false-god ways, they decided to split the sphere in half and leave men and women to search all their lives to find the one that would make their souls whole.
The term soulmate became more popular in America and England during the 19th century as romantic literature was on the rise. The idea of two souls longing for each other across space and time only to find one another in a moment of serendipity or even more exciting – for that love to go unrequited… sold books like crazy, and it also sold the generations to come on an idea of love that might not be entirely accurate.
Today, the idea of the soulmate is most clearly seen in the golden-era of Disney Animation. From their first animated film in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to their later films through the 1990’s like Beauty and the Beast, Disney perfected an entire genre of soulmate thinking. Heroes on white horses, sleeping beauties, and monsters just waiting for the right woman to make them into men – true or not, we lapped it up. For generations of Disney audiences, the idea of soulmates – well, we decided that the shoe fit.
And why wouldn’t we? It is a beautiful picture isn’t it. Everyone has their soulmate out there, just waiting to be found. Right?
The truth is more complicated than the movies. To start off with, let’s do a little math. If every soul has their one true soulmate – that means that right now, you have a 1 in 8.1 billion possibility of running across them. In comparison, the chances of you being struck by lightning are 1 in 500,000. Mathematically, soulmates are a difficult find. What if your soulmate lives on another continent? Or speaks another language? Or even worse, what if your soulmate died at an early age or settled along the way and now is married to somebody else’s soulmate. Oh, man, that gets messy doesn’t it? What if your soulmate is married to another’s soulmate which means both of you are missing out and then you settle and marry your un-soulmate and then exponentially soulmate-settling catches on like wildfire and eventually the entire 8.1 billion of us end up living our lives with one-sided love. According to Plato’s theory, our spheres will never be whole and the whole thing will forever be in chaos.
Thankfully, Plato’s mythological gods are nothing like the God of the Bible – the one, true Creator of heaven, earth, and every living soul. Soul searching doesn’t have to be that confusing… and it isn’t. One of my favorite verses is 1 Corinthians 14:33, “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” If we are confused about a subject, it isn’t because it has to be confusing, we’ve likely just gotten ourselves turned around… and I suspect that’s exactly what we’ve done with love, soulmates, and romance in a modern age.
The Bible does talk about the idea of our soul being connected to other souls.
Genesis 34 describes Shechem’s soul longing for Dinah.
· 1 Samuel 18 even talks about the friendship between Jonathan and David as a “soul knit” friendship and that Jonathan loved David “as his own soul”
· The Song of Solomon paints a picture of a woman searching for the “own whom her soul loves”
· Or Jacob who meets Rachel and is willing to work seven years to marry her and his love for her was so deep that the seven years “felt like nothing” to him. Wow… that’s some serious love – is that a soulmate?
· Even the creation of Adam and Eve sure feels like a soulmate – God saw that it wasn’t good for Adam to be alone so He made Eve as a helpmeet so the two of them could become one. That sounds a lot like soulmates to me.
So, with examples like these, does the Bible endorse the soulmate or not? I told you God isn’t confusing, but it sure feels confusing at this point. What’s the answer?
I think the issue is that we might not be asking the right question. Do soulmates exist? It seems like the Bible gives many examples of people who loved each other deeply and built partnerships together that greater than the individuals. The question isn’t whether or not soulmates exist – the question is whether soulmates are FOUND or CHOSEN.
I’m going to repeat that because I don’t want you to miss it. The question isn’t whether or not soulmates exist – the question is whether soulmates are FOUND or CHOSEN.
The modern theory emphasizes FOUND instead of CHOSEN. “The one” is out there, somewhere, you just have to find them or wait for them to find you. The modern soulmate ethos is a game of waiting (something we are seeing more and more of as the median age for marriage continues to rise in America) or even more dangerously a game of serial dating, moving from one relationship to another as quickly, intimately, and subjectively as possible and then pivoting to the next as soon as emotional obstacles get in the way. The modern soulmate theory expects us to fall into love and then just stay there. Perpetually existing in the final cut scene as the curtain closes on Cinderella and her Prince Charming.
Finding your soulmate also increases things like divorce because when you fall in love with someone else… well, you were just wrong about the first marriage, and it is time to end this false relationship because now you’ve found the real one. After all, now that you’ve found your soulmate – isn’t it the right thing to do whatever it takes to be with them?
But this isn’t the biblical picture. The Bible paints a picture of choosing who your soul loves. In fact, that’s what God does.
When God describes His love for Israel, He says, “The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers…” (Deuteronomy 7:6-7)
And in marriage, God says He hates divorce in Malachi 2:16, and commands in multiple places that you are to “rejoice in the wife of your youth” (Proverbs 5:18), “Enjoy life with your wife” (Ecclesiastes 9:9), and perhaps most importantly… “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” (Ephesians 5:25)
When marriage is compared to Jesus’ love of the church, it becomes clear it isn’t about finding soulmates, but choosing to be a soulmate. When Jesus loved the church, we were sinners, rebellious, and even enemies of God. Not much was lovable there – certainly not Disney soulmate material.
Instead, Jesus made a choice. A choice to love without regard to reciprocity. A choice to love because that was who He was. Candidly, that is easier said than done, but it paints a different model than the modern soulmate romanticism of today. It paints a picture of devotion worth aspiring to, instead of one that we stumble into by accident.
Science backs this idea up. In a study done in 2010, men and women surveyed in Louisiana were studied to see which marriages were more successful, the modern soulmate perspective or those marriages build along more traditional institutional views of marriage. It turns out that the marriages that enjoyed more stability, satisfaction, and less conflict were consistently those who viewed marriage as a commitment more than kismet. Marital success is a choice, not a serendipity.
Having said that, there seems to be two ways in which the Bible describes the soulmate choosing process. The first is the one we have already looked at – choosing to love someone because of your character and commitment. We might describe this as covenantal love. When we love because we have made a covenant, a promise to do so. If you are already married, this is the path to knitting your soul to your spouse. Two become one when they both choose love and to rejoice in life together. When two, good-willed people seek to choose each other every day, your partner becomes “the one” because you make them the one.
But what if you aren’t married? What if you haven’t made that choice yet? Is the answer to just married the first soul that agrees and then make it work? Should we go back to the days of arranged marriages and brides and grooms meeting for the first time on their day of their vows? I’m not advocating for that at all. For those who are single – the Bible points to a picture of finding BY CHOOSING.
If I choose to become a certain kind of person, I will become attractive to others who value those qualities. When I choose my soul, I create space for the right person to arrive.
We idioms for this in language – we say things like “birds of a feather flock together”, “like attracts like”, they are “two peas in a pod”, and “cut from the same cloth” and with a more accurate twist on the soulmate language we talk about two people being “kindred spirits”. All of these phrase point to the same principle – when you have two people with similar attitudes, interest, beliefs, character qualities, and goals – there is a natural attraction.
This truth holds in both positive and negative ways. Arrogance repels humility as much as kindness attracts gentleness. We tend to surround ourselves with people we choose to be influenced by. And this doesn’t just hold true in modern idioms, the Bible clearly states the same ideas.
Proverbs 13:20 says “walk with the wise and become wise”
1 Corinthians 15:33 says, “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character.”
Proverbs 22:24-25 warns, “Do not make friends with a hot-tempered person, do not associate with one easily angered, or you may learn their ways and get yourself ensnared.”
And 2 Corinthians 6:14 says “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common?”
In all of these verses, the principle rings true that we become who we choose to be around and who we surround ourselves with is based upon who we choose to be. Why would romance be any different?
If you want to find your soulmate, you must choose to be good company. It is less about searching and more about becoming. A bright light is easy to find on a dark night.
In a world that teaches serendipity and emotion are the key to romance, be better. Learn to choose instead of find. Choose to love and choose to become.
Learn to love better. Learn to choose.
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And until next time, “Remember, you are loved, so go… love better.”