Tied with Invisible String

Do you ever think about soulmates?

Is a real soulmate the twister that spins into your life, tears through every part to disappear just as quickly, and leaves nothing the same? Are they fire, passion, sensuality incarnate, invigorating- but in the back of your mind you wonder how long it will take to burn out? Or are they the one that stays, matched in every taste, through the difficult moments no matter how many times they want to call it quits for good?

We see couples everywhere that are deemed soulmates in music, literature, television and film. We watched the romance of Carrie and Big play out across both the small and silver screen, starting and stopping about as many times as she bought shoes, but we all breathed a sigh of relief when they finally tied the knot. "There. They are meant for each other. They lost and found each other so many times, they just have to be soulmates."

Heathcliff and Cathy, immortalized in the pages of Wuthering Heights, were all passion, all fire. They were selfish, cutting, horrid people; but we all felt ourselves rooting for them because we thought they were destined for each other. They loved each other so much, wonderfully and terribly, even up to death, leaving the carnage in their wake; but you still felt happy in the final pages of their reunion, that they could be together one last time. They must be soulmates.

And then, Jane. The lover who waited. Little Jane Eyre, tied with invisible string to Rochester's breast, unable to deny the Herculean pull they had on each other; suffering through his pretend devotion to the beautiful Blanche, the felicity of their engagement only to discover him already married to a madwoman, her own self-exile far from him, and the realization that the man she had once known was now a broken shell of himself that needed her a hundred times more than before. She waited, he waited for so long and had to fight so hard for each other. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, easy. Are they not soulmates? So different, yet crafted for each other in some inexplicable way?

Everyone has their own opinion of a soulmate, but there has to be some truth some permeating the confusion, angst and pleasure wrapped up in the emotional landmine that is the world of love. So many people mistake lust for love and love for lust, it's possible that we have lost the ability to realize what we have until it's ripped from our fingers. Physical attraction is such an integral part of the pull we feel towards other people, has it become the only thing that makes up our minds of who we love?

Of how we love?