I Found My Soul Mate in Myself

The sounds of the wedding march filled the air. Jennifer and I, bride and groom, were radiantly happy as we stood at the altar. After decades of searching, I had found and married my Soul Mate. It was the most thrilling moment of my life.

There was only one thing wrong with this scene. It was taking place solely in my own mind. I was in fact pacing up and down my own living room in a state of exhilaration, as my cassette player belted out the familiar music. Being something of a classical music and opera buff, I had selected Wagner's opera "Lohengrin" because it contained the traditional wedding march, and it was really firing my imagination.

The real truth was that I'd just returned home from only my third or fourth date with Jennifer. We hardly knew each other yet, so I was, to put it mildly, jumping to conclusions.

This was a familiar pattern with me, having begun many years ago when I was a shy 16-year-old boy growing up in England. I had a friend named Simon, and he and I would sometimes amuse ourselves by posing the question, "I wonder what my future wife is doing now?" Speculating idly on this unanswerable question allowed us to forget the unfortunate fact that since we attended an all-boys school, not only did we not have girlfriends, we didn't even know any girls.

It was at about that time that I began to entertain the notion of a Cosmic Soul Mate, the One who would appear at some unspecified point in my future and miraculously supply whatever it was that I lacked. This Soul Mate had neither face, nor name, nor form, and yet she was somehow more real in my imagination than any of the flesh-and-blood girls that I was soon to encounter.

Throughout the ups and downs of my skirmishes with the opposite sex during my teens and early twenties, this belief in a Soul Mate showed no signs of abating, in spite of the fact that the Soul Mate chose--as soul mates do--to postpone her appearance indefinitely.

In 1981, when I was thirty-two and still single--and still looking, perpetually--I left England behind for America, where I was to take up a job as a professor of literature at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest.

Never having been to America before, I had little idea of what to expect. For a while, culture shock--everything almost the same, nothing exactly the same--spun me in a whirl of disorientation.

But that changed on my second day on the college campus. I was taking care of some business in one of the administrative offices. As I made my inquiry, a look of delight crossed the face of the attractive young lady behind the desk. "Where are you from?" she asked, smiling at me. "You have such a wonderful accent."

So it was true! Americans really did say that when confronted with a perfectly ordinary BBC voice. I began to sense that living in America might have advantages that I had not hitherto suspected.

Thus emboldened, I plunged into a decade of Serious Quest for Soul Mate. After all, she was there, somewhere in this New World. She must be.

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