Soulmate Skills

They’re cool.  They’re distant.  You feel a rush of attraction.  You misconstrue their coolness as a sign of strength.  And you’re looking for that in a partner.  But, wait!  At some deeper level, beneath your consciousness, there’s machinery clanking away.  It’s Inner Critic-driven machinery that whispers in your ear, “This cool person is valuable–superior to you.  If you catch them, it proves you’re worth something.”  On top of that, your Black Hole that longs for the love of a distant person (like Mom was, or maybe Dad), nudges you with, “Maybe you can convert them into a warm, loving person.”  We’re here to tell you:  This is a losing game.  Conversions of this sort rarely occur.  When they do, it’s because the person does in-depth work on getting free from the armoring that creates that cool, distant exterior.  So, don’t trust that attraction you’re feeling.  Go for the warm, welcoming person in your world.  It will save you loads of pain.

This is a tricky subject.  It’s about your Black Hole.  That’s what we call the part inside us all that yearns for love.  It’s both a gift and a challenge.  The gift?  It causes us to fall in love, to seek intimacy, and to want to merge with another person.  The challenge?  To not let it dominate us so that we choose the wrong partner just to fill it at all costs.  It’s important that we become conscious about who we’re selecting to fulfill our Black Hole needs.  Are they free to be involved with us?  It’s tempting to choose someone, like an adult child, who loves us but needs to individuate from us.  Or to stick with someone who hasn’t developed psychologically enough to enter into a serious relationship.  Those choices will only produce pain.  Instead, we recommend you be guided by criteria that assure that the person wants as much involvement with you as you do with them.*  So, think about it.  Who’s your Designated Black-Hole Filler?

*Our compact book, Establishing Criteria for a Life Partner, will give you lots more guidance.  It’s available right here on our Sidebar.

What takes a fifth of a second, gives you a rush like a cocaine high, and touches your heart?  Falling in love!  We liked this study from Stephanie Ortigue at Syracuse University.  (See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101022184957.htm)  It happened to us too.  I walked into that meeting room the first day of my doctoral studies.  Saw one man in profile.  In a split second, took in his intelligence, his beauty, his wisdom.  Thought, “He looks like a psychologist; probably wouldn’t be interested in me.”  Responded to the first part of my thought; ignored the second part.  Walked straight to the chair next to him and sat down at his left hand.  I haven’t left his side since.  That fifth of a second changed my life.  So, if you think the time is passing slowly until your beloved comes, in a fith of a second, your soulmate will appear.

“I have gotten on a raft of some sort that was floating down a small gentle stream, and it was very pleasant, and I could get off whenever I wanted.  But then the stream widened, and the water got faster-moving, and now I must steer carefully to avoid the whirlpools and rocks, and it takes all the skill I have, and I love it.  Now the stream is so wide that I couldn’t disembark if I wanted to, and for an instant I feel trapped.  If I am trapped, it’s in a sweet, precious trap that brings forth much goodness in me like no other trap!”  Here Jim was musing on our relationship; the journey on which it was taking us.  It was one we had both longed for and awaited for many, many years.  Once embarked upon, it had us in its grip.  It has held us there for 21 years.  Whether you’re waiting on the bank for your soulmate or whether you’ve stepped onto the raft, or even if you’re traveling the rapids together, we can promise you:  Soulmate Love is a voyage worth waiting for.

“I think about you constantly (I mean every single minute, except when I’m with a client). ”  Jim’s words two months after we met.  Obsession?  Yes.  He added, “I understand quite well your fear of saying that you want so much of me that you will scare me away.” I was obsessed too.  Was that okay?  You bet.  Here’s how Jim described it:  “Right now we’re in a very intense phase of our relationship, an obsessive phase, and rightly so.  We are two very intensely feeling, very sensitive, very responsive people.  What we are doing now is building our relationship, letting our neediness show (risking it:  Can I really let the other see how strongly I feel?); actually checking each other out to see if the other can stand the power of our emotions.  We are not wishy-washy people.  We love fiercely, extravagantly.  But each of us is quite strong.  Each of us can confront great intensities of feeling.  As we test the acceptance of the other, we will begin to feel more and more secure.”  And we have.  That obsessiveness became a steady glow of security, love, and acceptance that has sustained us for 21 years.  So, take us as your guide.  Obsessing is fine; even desirable.  Just check to make sure that it’s mutual.  It’s a furnace that will have you both glowing.

Do you need to be physically attracted to your soulmate?  Short answer:  Yes.  That is, if your soulmate is your intimate sexual partner.  We’ve worked with couples in our therapy practice where one partner was not attracted to the other.  It continued to be a stumbling block to high-voltage relating.  One reason for the importance of physical attraction is that it’s not about movie-star good looks.  It’s that physical attraction is the end result of a stew of qualities in your partner that meld together into a powerful magnetic force.  For me, it was Jim’s intellect; his empathy; his strength, his maturity; his strong, graceful hands; his warm blue eyes that krinkle when he smiles; his broad shoulders; his nice butt; his incredible voice.  Two arguments that often are posed against the necessity of physical attraction are that sex fades over time and that you should choose someone who you’d want as your best friend.  To the first argument we say, not true.  Our clinical experience, along with the research in the field, say sex does not fade.  It remains important into old age.  We’re experiencing that ourselves.  As for the second argument, yes the best-friend quality is essential but not sufficient.  Without physical attraction,  they’ll remain your best friend, but not your soulmate lover.  So, go ahead, add physical attraction to your criteria list.  It’s the magnet that will draw you to each other and keep you firmly attached.

“My dear SoulMate, I need a connection with you.  A part of myself says, ‘You’re writing to him too much.’  But the bigger part of me knows that to reach out to you is good.  So I open my mind and heart and invite you in.  Welcome, Jim.”  I wrote this to Jim three weeks after our meeting.  You can hear the echo of those dating games we’re taught:  “Don’t pursue the man.  Let him pursue you.  Play it cool.  Don’t let them know how much you care.”  The problem with following such rules is that it’s not honest.  More important, it’s not connected.  And it’s definitely not close.  I took the risk to be open.  I wanted closeness with Jim so badly, that I was laying myself bare; as much as I dared.  Because he wanted as much closeness as I did, he didn’t reject my connecting.  No, he welcomed it and met me with his own yearning need.  We’re saying to you:  Look for that in your soulmate.  If, like us you’re ready for your soulmate, you’ll find that dating games are no fun.

Dear Soulmate Quester, we have a gem for you today.  It’s guidance on how to recognize your soulmate.  You’ve got it right in your memory bank.  What we’re suggesting is that you do a mental survey of your past partners.  We know.  Retrieving memories of your relationship history may seem like opening a Pandora’s box of pain.  However, it’s actually a treasure chest of valuable information on what to look for in a life partner.  Here’s what to do: List each partner’s name.  Then write a column titled “What I got from this person that I loved.”  Then write another column titled “What I didn’t get from them that I want.”  Finally, “What I got from them that caused me pain.”  From these lists you can extract the qualities you’re looking for in a soulmate.  The clarity you gain will clear your vision.  With clear eyes, you’ll recognize your soulmate.  [For more help on how to recognize your soulmate, read our guide:  "Establishing Criteria for a Life Partner," available here on our sidebar.]

Are we convinced that you should search for a soulmate?  Or should you wait passively, as in the Taoist principle of  non-interference, called wu-wei?  Five years after we married, Jim chronicled his active search for me:  “I began my search for you in 1941, in Detroit, little knowing that you hadn’t been born yet.  Let’s skip to November 1951, the first time there was a possibility of finding you.  In that month, I was back in the Navy in Pensacola, still searching.  You weren’t there.”  His letter follows his journey to California in the 1960s; to his master’s program in 1985; then finally to his doctoral program in 1989:  “By now I had a list of criteria.  And then there you were, sitting next to me in Curlew [our meeting room].  The more I found out about you, the more I realized it was you!  And so I began to fall in love with you.”  As for me, I had given up on ever finding a soulmate; had in fact, become cynical about love.  Yet, as I walked into that meeting room to begin my doctoral program, some locked-away part of me, the soulmate part, came alive.  She saw Jim.  She rejected all those empty chairs at a respectable distance from the only person yet in the room.  She sat in the chair next to him.  She had found her man.  As we step back from our individual stories to share with you, here’s what we see:  We were both actively pursuing our dream–getting our doctorate.  And we each had a longing for a soulmate that could not be quelled.  So, there’s no stopping it.  Whether or not your mind will admit it, your heart will be searching.  We recommend you equip yourself by reading our booklet, “Establishing Criteria for a Life Partner,” available on our sidebar.  Your mind and heart will be ready to recognize your soulmate.

“Our meeting is having a profound effect on us.  We have, it seems, taken a quantum leap into a new way of being.  It was just a sort of orientation session, and all we did was talk about our deepest concerns and then shared our love, but the ripples from that are still spreading through our lives; it was a big bang emotionally speaking.”  I’m quoting Jim’s letter to me of February 6, 1989, one month after our first meeting.  This is on my mind, because of a great article by Rebecca Webber in the September 2010 issue of Psychology Today.  It’s titled “Big Moments” and talks about those Aha! moments; peak experiences in our lives.  As Jim and I read it, we reaffirmed that meeting each other at our doctoral colloquium was a perfect example of one such peak experience.  Webber quotes Jeffrey Kottler, psychologist, on the impact of such moments:  “Their sense of who they were and what their place was in the universe had fundamentally shifted.”  When we read that, we both said, “Yes!”  Like us, when you find your soulmate, it will be a peak experience.  In fact, it will be a quantum leap in your life.