What Are We and Where Is This Going?

The projections that might separate us.

I was 4 years old when I met my first soulmate.

That’s right, I said soulmate. That’s right, I said first.

We recognised each other instantly and held hands without sharing a word. What can I say, our eyes met across a crowded playground! This was no romantic cliché, our recognition was one of pure joy - like spotting mum in the supermarket after getting a bit lost. Nevertheless, we came home to each other that day.

We were best friends for years. It should have been beautiful. However, what with him being a boy and me a girl, a social dictation was permeating our love like a gas. We were constantly badgered about whether we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Would we get married one day? What were we? (…we were children, that’s what we were!!)

Time wore on, and at the grand old age of 8, it all got too exhausting. ‘It’ being the endless speculation from friends, siblings and parents and their insistence that ‘boys and girls are never just friends’. We were outnumbered and surrounded. So we caved to convention and became ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ (albeit the 8-year-old kind).

Our connection almost immediately disintegrated. It was all too weird. What had once felt unquestionable was now totally confusing.

We stopped holding hands after that.

We kept a ‘sort of’ friendship, but our knowing was shattered and what remained was unclear. We drifted, growing more and more distanced.

He died when we were thirteen. I still struggle to make sense of that.

Why did I tell that story?

Throughout my life I’ve met many people I feel a profound connection with. New acquaintances of soul-deep familiarity. Though I wonder how many times I confused that for romantic love because I’d been conditioned to believe this is the highest form of connection?

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat Pray Love, Richard-from-Texas explains that soulmates aren’t the people you marry. They’re the mirrors to parts of your soul that show up to remind you or teach you about something you’ve lost or forgotten. They’re meant to be transient yet we so often torture ourselves trying to hold onto them. Usually because they awakened something that had been asleep.

We pine for years, sometimes lifetimes, if we can’t hold onto these core-shakers, ever-chasing that feeling of soul-deep connection. We focus on the loss of something we tried to possess, rather than the recognition of two souls who will, in some form or another, forever be connected.

I can think of certain past relationships that, beautiful as they were, should have been lifelong friendships. Unions cut short because we tried to do the man-woman thing (“the two can’t just be friends y’know!”). It doesn’t make me love them less, or indeed diminish the importance of our connection. But they were never meant to be in my life long-term, nor I in theirs.

The gravitational drag of social expectations, movie narratives, and cultural zeitgeist can distort our inner compass when we make ‘romantic love’ our north star. We assume the big feelings of deep connection must be love. And to love someone must surely mean…sex/commitment/marriage?? I’m aware that my perspective here is one of a heterosexual woman. And I have heterosexual male friends who’ve told me they can’t see past the sexual allure of a woman due to biology rather than social dictation. But whether it’s projections of romance or a ‘f**k-first-ask-questions-later’ situation, we distort friendships once we view them through a different lens, potentially sabotaging a connection that was meant to exist beyond convention.

The Ancient Greeks are said to have had 8 different words for love. Words that help differentiate the many different forms that love can take:**

Eros - physical love, sexual desire, passion, lust, and/or (sometimes) romance.

Philia - affectionate love, friendship, kinship.

Agape - unconditional love, sacrificial love, deep undying selfless love.

Storge - familial love, deep bonds of loyalty and duty and belonging.

Mania - (as the name suggests) - obsessive, possessive, selfish love. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t stop thinking about them love.

Ludus - playful, noncommittal love. Flirting, seduction, casual sex.

Pragma - practical, sometimes transactional love. Duty, obligation, logical ‘good on paper’ love.

Philautia - love and positive regard for the self. Inner love and personal connection to self.

**(these are not fixed states, as love can evolve over time).

It’s a confronting list when we acknowledge how often we confuse one thing for another. I could name countless songs, books and film scripts, for example, that present Mania as the tell-tale indicator of ‘true love’, when it is, in fact, a self-serving projection of ego, masked as devotion.

It’s also interesting to note how wildly different the nature of each bond can be, yet how often we expect (and demand) that we find so many variations with just one person.

It feels important that we give ourselves more freedom to explore and share with people we feel profoundly connected to, without automatically loading it with the pressure of sex and romance. After all, the more we dress one thing up as another, the less able we are to recognise the real thing when it shows up.

I truly believe that when share a deep (authentic) connection with somebody, in whatever form of relationship, we are in someway forever bonded. Forever imprinted, even if just slightly, on each other’s soul.

Of course, not everyone believes in the soul, never mind who may or may not be mates with it. But we can all acknowledge the projections and expectations we develop, sometimes unhelpfully, due to inherited social narratives.

I so often think of my first true friend. What more we might have shared if we’d stayed connected. How happy I am that we found each other that first day. And how thankful I am that at so many points in my life I still feel him next to me, holding my hand.

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Reflection

Using the Greek words (or creating your own table of definitions), think about the significant relationships in your life, past and present, and where they might feature within the table…

(I excluded Philautia with regards to self-love but you may find it interesting to consider your relationship with the different parts of your persona - which do you hold in the highest positive regard? which the least? etc.)