Single friends have often asked me how I met/found my husband. I promise them that our marriage isn't as idyllic as it looks from the outside, but I also know that we're pretty freaking fortunate to have what we have with each other. We met by completely random chance on a dating website. He picked me out because I wasn't looking (necessarily) for romance, I was looking for a future travelling buddy. I wasn't looking for someone to look after me, or live up to any kind of romantic ideal. Me? I was curious and intrigued by his unconventional love letters and shockingly good grammar, spelling, and mechanics.
Anyway, I read this blog post this morning and it made me think of that one time in a ritualistic setting I asked for a mental image of my soul mate so I'd know him when I met him. The image I got was of Russell, but it was not the Russell I was about to meet, rather the Russell who would be my future husband. And when I finally figured that out, it was like.... oh holy shit. I just knew. And when he did ask me to marry him, I answered immediately without thinking. And then I asked for a week to think about it, to make absolutely sure. I'm pretty certain that entire week the ground shook beneath my feet with the certainty that I'd found my soulmate. This wasn't my first marriage proposal. The others had made me feel queasy inside in a bad way. This was nothing like that.
The day of our wedding, before we walked in, my Dad told me he'd handle things if I wasn't completely sure I wanted to go through with it. I am unbelievably grateful he asked me that, because nobody else did. In a situation where most people are only focused on the event, the dress, etc., he had the guts to ask me if I was making the right decision, for me. (You should also know that he told me he really liked my future husband, and that he thought getting married was a good decision.) He'd noticed my knees were knocking and my hands were shaking. I almost started to cry and told him that the reason I couldn't stay still and could barely stand up was that I'd never been so excited about anything in my entire life.
This year has been both rough and extremely rewarding. Everyone said having a baby would change everything, and they're right. And my mum tried to get me to think about how I'd handle certain situations but I refused because we weren't like that. And sometimes we were like that. I was right about one thing though - thinking about it ahead of time would have done nothing for me because a scenario in my head is completely different from a scenario in real life involving other people. And sometimes I needed my husband to tell me what to do because I was too tired, emotional, and angry to see anything clearly. He didn't like it, but he did it. And it was okay. Not awesome, but okay.
We're both introverts too, and that is a bit of a game changer. If we do have a fight, it doesn't even start to get resolved until the next day. We need time and space to think. But I'm glad we've persevered. There is absolutely nothing in the world like being loved by someone you love.
I don't have advice for someone looking to find a soulmate. I don't really know how to find one. I guess you need to just be yourself, always, and look for someone who treats you as an equal, actually cares about you, and challenges you to be a better person because they already believe you are that better person. And you need to give that back to them as well. You also need to be able to communicate everything with that person, even if it's a sentence that starts with "I was thinking about leaving you. But I didn't." You need to be able to talk about the scary things. It helps too to understand that everyone comes with baggage. You need to be able to feel absolutely safe with each other because stuff will come up.
If I were going to search for a soulmate, assuming I hadn't found one, I'd probably do it the very same way: figure out what I really, really want in life, and search for someone who shares some of my goals. And my goals really haven't changed all that much: I want to travel, I want to dance professionally, and I want to raise my child(ren?) to be more awesome than I am, and I want to do as much of it as possible with my soulmate, while walking beside him as he achieves his life goals.
