Soul-mating

Hsu, the pioneer of Chinese free verse and the son of a banker who was Cambridge educated, once wrote: “I am seeking for my one true soul mate in the vast sea of humanity. I will be fortunate if I find her; if not, that will be my fate.” He thought he had found his true love in a young actress, but their relationship soured rather quickly after he divorced his wife and married her. Hsu died in a horrific airplane crash in his mid-thirties, but his story of soul-mating remains. I was once an admirer of the poet and spent a lot of time searching for my one and only in my youth and finally came to realize that one’s so-called soul mate is not discovered through laborious searching; it is made through persistent effort.

With effort, we may make a soul mate out of almost anyone. If soul-mates are found, then millions of people throughout the older generations were deprived of this good fortune, for their mates were chosen for them. But that simply wasn’t the case, for many of them created soul-mates out of spouses whom they hardly knew when they tied the knot, yet their marriages turned out to be quite enjoyable because of the effort they put into the cultivation of their relationship.

Physical attraction between the sexes isn’t self-sustaining and we are doomed to failure if that’s the sole instrument we employ to prop up our relationship with our mates. When we age, it will become secondary and our primary need for love and friendship will emerge; a relationship will inevitably collapse if these elements are absent. Therefore we should consider soul-mating of primary importance in our relationships and spend time and effort cultivating it. There is no need, as a matter of fact, for us to exhaust all our energy searching for a soul-mate that may or may not exist, we just have to determine to make soul-mates out of the ones we now have, or the ones we will meet someday, either by design or by chance.