Do I Know You from Somewhere?

Our latest book in Remedial Book Club is Wings of Time: Breaking Darkness, by SD Barron. It’s a great book, and she is a local author, so I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a good read. In the book, the 2 main characters, Hallie and Liam, are soulmates. Well, she doesn’t use that word explicitly, but when they kiss for the first time, it feels as though they have missed doing so. As though they had done so in a previous life. If you’ve dated someone in more than one lifetime, that person probably qualifies as a soulmate.

In the biography about Edgar Cayce, There is a River, Cayce says that we will continue to get involved with the same people in our next lives, working out conflicts until we get them right. So he suggests that if you have a problem with your partner now, you might as well get it resolved in this lifetime. If we keep getting involved with the same people in different lifetimes, that also implies we have soulmates. And Cayce was psychic, so he would know.

I looked up what Plato said about soulmates, since he was the first person to talk about them. In his story, Zeus split humans in half because they were a threat to the gods. After that, each human lived in misery, forever searching for their other half. When they find one another, there is an immediate recognition of the other, and they reunite and live happily ever after.

I’ve definitely had the experience of meeting someone who I felt like I already knew. Not just with romantic partners, but with friends and other people, too. Recently I had to call this dietitian that was working with one of my clients (X). The first thing she said to me was, what are we going to do about X? As though we knew each other and had worked together for a while. We laughed and joked a lot in what was supposed to be a consultation between 2 professionals who had never met.

The second time we talked, I told her that I felt as though we already knew each other, and she agreed. We felt like we probably would have been friends if we didn’t live in different states. The last question she asked me before we ended the conversation was what I was dressed up as for Halloween, because it was Halloween that day. Really professional, right? If you know me, then you know that I love dressing up for Halloween. But she doesn’t. Or does she?

So what does that make her? My professional soulmate? Did we work in the same practice together in a former life?  Maybe we have an entire soul neighborhood with the same friends and family and pets but they get spread out all over the world in the next life. Maybe that’s why you can feel that recognition with more than one person.

This is the 5th time I’ve dated my current boyfriend. The first time was 30 years ago when I was taking this 300 level philosophy class. I had dropped my intro philosophy class my first year of college because I thought it was going to be too hard. But the next year I decided I wasn’t going to let philosophy beat me! So I took this esoteric class on Kant and Hume to prove I could do it, and he was in the class because he was a philosophy major.

Our first date was the worst date I’ve ever had. We disagreed about where to eat, what movie to see, what to do, who should walk in front of whom. And yet we still talked and did things together for the rest of that semester. A year later, we dated one summer when we both stayed in Charlottesville, and that went really well. But then he went abroad and we cheated on each other. And then we dated again a year later, shortly after we graduated, and it ended badly. And then again about 15 years ago, and it ended badly. And then we started dating again last year.

I have never dated anyone more than once. I don’t even remain friends or stay in touch with most of my ex’s after the relationship ends. So dating someone 5 times is really unheard of for me. Probably for most people. Especially since it only went well 1 out of the 4 times prior. I’m not sure if I believe in soulmates, but it’s hard to deny that there is something that draws us together over and over. Who knows? Maybe this could be our 100th time if you add up all of our lives. Which would make both of us really slow learners.

If nothing else, it makes for a good story about how we met.