 Hello, this is the second in the series of Dr. Samford Chalkentuck videos in which I am responding at greater lengths to questions that have been asked to me in other formats, most notably in VU, or sometimes by email, some questions that have come up in classes or have been brought up to me in other formats. So, this is a follow-up, and in this one, I am addressing a question that came up in VU in relation to the idea of soulmates, and somebody asked me, do you believe in soulmates? I've already talked about that in another video, so I said yes, I do believe in soulmates, and they asked me, does that mean having a perfect marriage, no fighting, complete harmony, and that's an interesting question as well, and I think that in order to make sense of it, it helps to think about what it needs to be soulmates, and there's a very easy answer to this one, which is, no, as a matter of fact, I don't know anybody who has a marriage that's perfect, where they never fight, where there's complete harmony, I know some couples who don't fight on the surface, but sometimes they, their intentions underneath, and over time people change, their priorities may bring them away from each other, so these are, these are good questions. Let's look at this by thinking of it in terms of this whole notion of soulmates, that's assuming that you buy into this conception of a soulmate, so what do we mean by that? Well, there are some classical understandings, one of the most interesting and even funny understandings comes from this guy, Aristophanes, actually it comes from Plato, Plato tells us that Aristophanes tells this story in a dialogue on the Symposium, where all of them are supposed to get speeches about love, and Aristophanes does not get a speech precisely about love, what he does instead is he tells a story, it's a funny story, so here's, here's how it goes, in the beginning, human beings didn't look the way that we do know, as a matter of fact, we're only half of what was left after the God's diviners. Originally, mansion human beings were, instead of having a bath like this, there was another human being affixed to it, so we had two faces, and we had four legs and four arms, and we moved around by rolling, and we were very powerful, we were very powerful beings, and as often happens in Greek myths, what did the beings that are too powerful do? They get too big for their britches, they start tackling the gods, and so the gods decide we need to put an end to this, so they split them in half, and after they split them in half, affixed to us, sews up the bat part, and pulls everything together in the front, and that's where we get the belly button from. Now, what happens when these halves are split from each other? Aristophanes says, there were three kinds of beings. There were those that had two sets of male sex organs, there were those who had two sets of female sex organs, and then there was the kind that had one set of male sex organs and one set of female sex organs, and each of those had a half that they were missing once they were split apart, so if you have a man, or male part, and a woman part of the original same being, and it gets split right down the middle, well now these two parts are separate from each other, but they get long to have that unity with each other, and so what they would do that is they would find each other if they could, and just grasp onto each other, you know, embrace and not do much of anything else. So, not much was getting done, and many of them were dying for not eating, and not taking care of themselves, so they started rearranging some other things, and I'm not going to go through the whole myth right now, suffice it to say that the notion here is that on some level, on some level of our being, human beings, whether attracted to the same sex or attracted to the opposite sexes, for each one that's out there, there's another one that corresponds to that best. Now, in Aristotle's myth actually, if one partner dies, then the one who is alive goes looking for another one like them, so it's not as if they're soulmates in the sense of, I have only this one, and only this woman will do for me. It's more like types, you might say, but that gives you an understanding of one way of looking at that soulmates. There's somebody out there who is your other half, your missing half, your better half perhaps, or sometimes your worst half. So that's Aristotle's. Aristotle also talks about friendship in this way, that the true friends are like two souls, or it's about one soul and two bodies, and that's a kin to this notion of soulmates as well. So what are some other notions? Well, if you think about romantic plays, novels, songs, and you also think about classical conceptions of the cosmos and of human affairs, you can talk in terms of people being somehow connected to each other, oriented towards each other. And I'm going to talk about three different ways of understanding this, three very different ways actually. There's the notion of fate. Somebody is destined to another person. Why? We don't know. There's no actual rational explanation. If you just say fate, you're not actually explaining much other than to say that there's something going on beyond what we see, what we feel, what we hear. There's something beyond that that connects things together. You know, there are anthropomorphic conceptions of the fates. You know, the Greeks had some, the Norse had some, and they liked this metaphor of weaving threads together. So think of soulmates perhaps as being two people whose threads are woven together by this fairly irrational, lined force, which can be resistant to some degree, but probably never fully evaded. Once you have a fate, you're stuck with it and you can't really get away from it. In Eastern religions, you have this conception of karma and some conceptions of soulmates that you find in the East and also in Western appropriations of Eastern thought rely on this notion of karma, karmic attachment, and also on the associated conception of reincarnation. So if I have a soulmate according to that conception, then she and I have crossed paths in previous lives and we are somehow connected to each other. And there could be a variety of ways in which this took place. Interestingly, if you accept this notion of reincarnation, then one's sexuality becomes a function of one's presence in life and not necessarily of one's past life. As a matter of fact, in countries that believe in reincarnation, they tend to be male-dominated countries. So if you're born as a woman, your lot of life is not as good as those who are born men, and the conception is you must have done something wrong. If you're born a man, you must have been pretty good in your last life. Now, let's put that gender dynamics stuff aside and let's think about this. If you have a soulmate, that means that through life after life after life, somehow you are coming together and then you live together for a while, maybe fall in love. And then one of you dies and goes off into, as they say, another womb. And then the other one dies, goes off into another womb. They're reborn and they will somehow find each other and come together again. And the world will contribute ways in which this can take place. Okay, that's a very interesting conception. If you think in terms of traditional monotheism, you know, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, if you think in terms of a beneficent, omnipotent, omniscient creator and a ranger of affairs, a God who cares about humanity and what goes on within the world, then you have the notion of a providential order. And if you think of the notion of soulmates in that case, then you might actually get something very close to the conception of, that we have in Christianity, a vocation to marriage. If, for example, I am supposed to be the soulmate of this woman over here, one way of thinking about that, and this is in fact the way I prefer to think about it, is I have a vocation to be with her as her spouse and that I won't be fully complete. I won't have my other half. I won't have what makes me, makes my potentials come out, what makes me flourish unless I'm with her. And I could be with other women. But I won't be fulfilled in a way that I was designed to be, that I was intended to be providentially, unless I'm actually with her, and I suppose unless I am doing the things that I want to be doing with her. And this takes me to my third conception that I want to talk about. We have Aristophanes, sort of a common conception. We have these different conceptions of fate, or karma, or providence, some thing beyond us, bringing us together. Where is our responsibility in this? I like to think of this notion of becoming a soulmate. Even if you assume anything like this, if you have another half that was destined to you, because you were originally part of the same whole, or if there's something like this going on, there's still room for the individual human beings, the persons who are involved there, to exercise some sort of agency, to take some sort of active role. You know, think about it. Our potential as human beings is quite often latent, unless we bring it out. And, you know, a lot of times when they talk about human potential, many of the people who advocate that use that sort of language, they think in terms of the individual. What if instead, we think in terms of relationships? What if we adopt what we call a personalistic attitude? Where the human person is not understood solely as an individual, but through their relationships that we exist through our relationships. Well, if you have a soulmate, in a way, it's because you actually make the right choices with that person. And so do they with you. And you collaborate together on certain basic goods that can only be attained and truly worked out when both of you are cooperating with each other. You know, for example, if you think about sexuality, you can go out and screw just about anybody you like, and not necessarily form much of an attachment other than some sort of lost, you know, you have endorphins that go through your brain, but you may not actually like that person. You may wake up next to them in the morning and say, oh my god, I made terrible mistake. What sexuality offers us is potential is the capacity to develop deeper and deeper levels of intimacy. But that requires choices. That requires working like I put here, growing through, you know, conflict sometimes growing through the choices that we make. Now to go back to this original question. If you find your soulmate, or you can have a perfect marriage, or you're not going to have any conflict, how do we in fact grow? How do we develop as moral beings? How do we develop as persons? It's sometimes you know, through education, sometimes things work out well. But so often it's through conflict, it's through having to take opposite positions and then work our way to see the other person's point of view, and the relative validity that it has. And to learn to love people despite our differences with them. I think that that may in fact be part of a fuller conception of being a soulmate to the other person. So I'm going to leave you with several ending questions. Here's another one that I have been thinking about for some time. Let's say there are soulmates. Does that mean that everybody has a soulmate? Maybe not. It could be quite possible that I have a soulmate, but you don't. Or vice versa. Or perhaps we could be lucky enough to have soulmates, but that poor guy over there, there's nobody for him. Those are all possibilities. Now, if we think in terms of fate, destiny, providence, maybe there are soulmates for everybody. Does everybody deserve a soulmate? That's a good question too.