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Soul Mates

A couple of weeks ago in my Shakespeare class, we were studying the play Twelfth Night, and my professor began the discussion by pointing out that in Shakespeare's plays, he idealizes a kind of love that is entirely different than the sort of love we idealize in society today, and that is the kind of love between two people who are completely, genuinely soul mates. The most interesting thing about Shakespeare's view on love, though, is that this love is something completely separate from romance or physical attractive; this deep love could even be between two friends or siblings. This was the sort of love that Shakespeare idealized, not the kind of love that sweeps you off your feet and sends your hormones into a frenzy.

Ever since this conversation, I have been thinking so much about my life and about love, and I came to the conclusion that lately I have been searching for the wrong kind of love. For over a year now, I've been posting all of these blogs about wanting to find/thinking I have found a love that would fulfill me when really I had just found tamer varieties of the kind of love I had always had before: that heart racing, cheeks blushing, trying to win him over from the very beginning kind of love. But I think Shakespeare was right. I look at the people in my life who have the happiest marriages and have maintained those happy marriages, and the first thing they tell me about why it has worked is that it's because they married their best friend. They found someone they could share that deep, soul mate kind of love with and who also gave them those feelings of attraction and romance.

I mean, let's be honest here, it doesn't take much to woo me and make me swoon. But to get me to trust you in such a way that I will allow myself to depend on you or to develop such a bond with me that I would follow you across the country if we had to? That takes something special. Not only that, but it is going to take a special person to love me for all that I am. Anyone who wants to spend their life with me will have to see what I do with the kids I work with and realize that he will almost always be my second priority. I won't always be home to make dinner for him or eat dinner with him, I will be busy on the weekends, and even when I am at home my mind will almost always be on work because that's what happens when you choose a career that is also your true passion, when you wake up every day knowing you are dedicating your life to doing something that makes the lives of others better. But at the same time, he has to see that my heart will always be his, that when I am laying next to him in bed at night, it is the place I am happiest to be; he has to know that I will text message him or call him during the day just to say hi and see how he is, and that I will thank him, with an inexpressible sincerity, in every set of director's notes I ever write from the moment I meet him.

I guess some people can be happy in a relationship where they don't have that kind of deep connection with the person they're married to, but I don't think I will ever be that person. It will take finding my soul mate to be happy with someone forever.

And who knows? Maybe I've found him. This certainly feels far different and far better than anything before.

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