Soulmate or Strollmate?

In this season of love, a colleague threw out a question in the staffroom: “do you believe in soulmates?” A lively discussion followed with several of the younger staff stating that everyone had many soulmates, some of the older ones stating “NO” emphatically and others debating what the definition of a soulmate was. I was silent, silently thinking about this thing called love.

There’s a line in Irish singer, Ronan Keating’s love song When You Say Nothing At All that says, “all day long, I hear people talking out loud” which sums up what’s happening around me in the very young place I work at. It seems like everyone’s either in love or fresh out of love, ready for the next “soulmate”.

This is a topic which has perpetually confused me. Perhaps the confusion began in grade 3 when I dreaded going out to recess because there was a Gary waiting almost every day to chase me around the school yard, swinging his backpack (don’t know why he always had that thing at recess), wanting to play kissing tag. I was more befuddled in grade 8 when the teacher left our classroom “party” and it promptly turned into a “prom” and the local female bully forced me with clenched fists to dance with her best friend, a slight timid boy who had a crush on me. That was the one and last time I ever danced with a boy.

Of course I was brought up in a very sanitized way when it came to matters having to do with boys. In the beginnings of high school, such things were not discussed at home. There was childhood and play-with-everyone (we were never strictly told don’t play with the boys – in fact, my sister and I frequently had my brothers and their friends change their clubhouse signs willingly from boys only to boys only + h and s and, we had the most awesome time climbing trees with the best of them) and then…there was supposed to be adulthood and marriage.

The in-between was the tricky part my parents never imagined navigating. So in grade 10, when my mom sent my sister to throw the garbage down the chute and she came back in saying there was a guy with blond hair and blue eyes waiting outside, I almost died of a heart attack. It was James, a junior and the captain of the baseball team. He had send me 2 candy-grams so far that year with notes like “i hope to see you at the next dance” and I had kept them even though I ignored him in the hallways (and, even though my dancing career had ended in grade 8). Before my mother could get to the door and raise a quizzical eyebrow at him, I went to the door and raised a quizzical eyebrow myself, blocking my mother’s slow, interest-piqued gait coming from the kitchen. He wanted to know if I wanted to take a walk by the lake with him. I wanted to say can’t you see this big blue thing on my head? But instead, I mumbled sorry, I’m busy and closed the door. When I peeked through the peephole a while later, he was still there – now befuddled himself.

The terror of seeing that blond hair through the peephole of my home turf helped me steer clear of keeping candy-grams from then on. And by the end of high school, my father had begun discussing such topics as crushes and “interests” with us – with a very positive, almost over-eager manner. He was just trying to be a good, open father and I was just an embarrassed 17 year old, with snapping gum and crossed arms. After a while he gave up trying to find out our true feelings in a transparent way (“so my daughter, is there anyone you feel anything towards that you would like to tell me about so we can discuss it away?”). He dwindled down to explaining the Islamic view of such matters and we left it at that. I’m so glad now that he made it seem normal – this thing called love or, rather, this thing called the “stirrings of love”.

Amidst this deepening confusion, I embarked on the voyage called matrimony very early – I was the second from my large circle of friends to get hitched. The un-hitching (which is what I prefer to call it, the other word being shuddery) has caused me more confusion as to the matter of soulmates and this thing called…yes, you know.

But recently I read a beautiful essay by Sarah Polley entitled “On Marriage and Fiction” which lit another lantern in my head and yes, my heart. She wrote about Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” which Polley had turned into the recently released and critically-acclaimed film, Away From Her. She wrote about how the story left her weeping. She wrote “this story helped me move my idea of love – specifically unconditional love – into something much less melodramatic and typically cinematic, yet unfathomably deep and complicated in its own right.”

I’m beginning to see that’s how I’ve been seeing it too. There’s a site called Imagini VisualDNA which asks you to click on images which describe the way you define terms and every single time, for “Love is…”, I click on the image of an elderly couple smiling serenely at each other – not exactly the first image which comes to mind under the heading of love.

But I think that is what love is. Endurance, quiet and unquiet companionship, respectful spaces and the ability to weave mercy into a cover for each other. You know, a strollmate. That’s my definition of a soulmate.