I don't believe in soul mates.

This may sound like the confession of a jaded wife who's been bitterly disappointed in love, but good news! I'm ridiculously happy in my marriage!

But about that soul mates thing.... Joshua and I have a little saying in our house:

We were not made for each other; we are being made for each other.

It was our first year of marriage and I had made dinner (meaning I had successfully combined and heated the ingredients in the box), so I called out to Joshua in the other room. "Joshi! Dinner's ready!" He came into the kitchen to find me at the table, happily eating.

J: "Hey... You didn't get a plate for me?"

K: "You're pretty close to the cabinet. It would take you, like, 2 seconds to get a plate yourself."

J: "I can, but you could have grabbed it when you got a plate for yourself."

K: "Sure, but, anyway, you're riiiight there. You should grab a plate so we can eat."

J: "Looks like you already started."

*awkward silence*

K: "Sooo... Are your arms broken, or are you going to grab yourself a plate?"

I honestly didn't understand what his problem was. He wanted a plate and he was four feet from the cabinet where all the plates were located. The most obvious solution was for him to just get a plate. And he honestly didn't understand why I would have walked over to the cabinet and gotten just one single plate, served myself, and started eating. The most obvious thing would have been for me just to get two plates instead of one.

Soul mates probably would have had that figured out from day one, being made for each other and all that. But not us. We weren't made for each other. We had a lot of incidents like this, squinting at each other incredulously, trying to understand if the other person was really serious because that thing they just said sure sounded ridiculous...

Joshua comes from a home where dinner means the whole family around a decorated dining table, holding hands for prayer, and no one touches the dessert before Granny. I come from a family where we don't even eat Thanksgiving dinner at the same time; it's a come-and-go thing. So my husband and I had to work on understanding each other, hearing each other, and then adapting to each other. We had to work on how and when to get the dinner plates, the tone to use when saying sorry, the timing of alarm clocks, the tactical negotiations of closet space, and much more.

If you spend your romantic energies trying to find your soul mate, that one perfect person who was created for you, you are setting yourself up for disappointment (and likely overlooking a lot of good candidates along the way). There is no perfect person out there, and the person for whom you were created isn't your spouse---it's your Creator. Even when you do find a great/kind/committed/godly/romantic/stable/wise person to spend your life with, no matter how amazing your love is, your marriage will require investment: listening, adapting, working to love your spouse in a way that makes sense to them.

For a very happy marriage, you don't need a soul mate, you need a willingness.

moves and removes