I just received the most incredible news from a friend. A friend of mine has just met his soulmate and they're getting engaged, all within the timespan of two months. Don't get me wrong, people meeting their soulmates is not incredible. My cousin got engaged to her soulmate this spring. I just don't expect my friends, people in my peer group of cynical twenty and thirtysomethings to just up and meet their soulmates.

I expect more hemming and hawing. I expect moments of fear and indecision. I expect overanalysis. I expect long lengths of time. I don't expect use of the word mate or soulmate.

Maybe I project. Maybe I just don't know what it feels like. I quote my friend: "People have always said that you just know when you met your mate. I had always laughed. Not any more. I just know. She just knows. Pretty wild."¹

Or maybe I know what it feels like and I just didn't recognize it at the time. That would be a big bummer, right? You might laugh, but it took me half a year to figure out that that thing I had, that was an orgasm. So I find it completely conceiveable that I could have just not gotten it at the time.

That maybe the person who fit my physical ideal, or the person who fit my romantic ideal, or the person who fit my idealistic ideal, or the person who fit my intellectual ideal,² that was my soulmate.

But maybe not. My friend and I have had long conversations about this, prior to his meeting his soulmate. About special people who were the only people who were able to make him feel one way or the other. So he knows about what I call the "partial-fit" phenomenon, and this, this apparently isn't just a partial fit. This is everything.

The suddenness,³ the everything, I do not understand, experientially. Two months! And . . . everything?

Maybe he is delusional. Maybe he is high.⁴

Or maybe this kind of thing does happen. Maybe it could even happen to each and every one of us, if we luck out in the Brownian motion game of dating.⁵

Or maybe I am too picky, too specific in my likes and dislikes for this type of model to work for me. Because that's what this is--a model of how love works.

This reminds me of a Milan Kundera story, I can't remember the title. About an athiest who fell for this girl not because of the girl herself, but because of her faith in a god. And he stopped falling for her when it turned out her faith was just appearance. He had wanted, very much wanted, to be able to believe in something like that, and the upshot was that although he himself had no faith, he had faith that there is faith.

I showed my friend Wes this story, and he thought it was an ugly story, at the time. I thought it was beautiful.

Is there a universal model? Like a single god or diety or whatever? Or are there a million of them, from soul-mate models to partner models to companion models to compatable models, and only in one of them do you ever just know?

Do you know?

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Later note: Now that I've gotten over my shock, I am starting to think that it is a matter of timing, mostly. That one cannot find a soulmate until one is ready. That readiness doesn't have to be conscious, it's just some weird internal thing.

My thinking on this will probably change several times in the next year.

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1. I will take off this quote if you tell me to. You know who you are.

2. This is getting to be fairly anonymized for one of my web ramblings. You all should know who you are as well.

3. Okay, the sweeping suddenness I understand. I experienced it, just once. It was bizarre, and he wasn't everything I ever wanted and more. But the feeling was instantaneous and overwhelming and strange and awakening. Maybe that in itself is everything.

4. He most certainly is high. But I mean chemically.

5. There are puns. But I will not make them.