I Found My Soul Mate in Myself

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I certainly looked. At faculty meetings, for example, my eyes would dart around the room for clues, as if American Soul Mate, Ph.D., might, in a mystical moment of recognition, disclose herself by look, word or gesture understood only by me.

One thing I did notice was how much psychic energy this took, and how restless and unhappy it sometimes made me, particularly when my relationship with Soul Mate du jour would fall apart after only a few months.

Take Jennifer. Jennifer, in my eyes, had class, dignity, intelligence, beauty. And reservations.

"It doesn't feel quite right to me," she said to me over dinner one night.

"Would you like some more pasta?" I replied.

"I think you have too many expectations."

"No, I don't," I shot back, demonstrating my finely honed ability to deny the obvious.

A few more hops and skips, and Jenny and I had reached the familiar conclusion: tension-filled silences followed by angry outbursts, culminating in Jennifer's coup de grace, "I don't think we should see each other again."

And so the long-running play continued. A series of unsuspecting women found themselves filling a position they neither asked for, nor (with some exceptions) wanted. And often in the background, my tapes of "Lohengrin," as well as the Mendelssohn wedding march from his "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, would rotate merrily around their spindles. Still the real Soul Mate eluded detection.

One morning a few years ago, I had just returned from the gym, which I had found to be an interesting, if so far unproductive, place to scout for Soul Mate-in-Skimpy-Workout-Gear. It was spring and the lilacs in my yard were in bloom. I sat on the deck with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in my hand, looking out on the display of nature's greenery. It wasn't the high from the workout or the coffee that did it, but I gradually became aware that everything in that moment was perfect. Everything was exactly as it should be. Nothing else was needed. Nothing added or subtracted from that minute could possibly "improve" it. This certainly wasn't the way I normally felt, having conditioned myself to believe that what every minute really needed was a quick infusion of Soul Mate.

And yet that moment shifted something inside me. I don't know how or why, but I do know that it has continued, that there is a tranquil "place" inside me, that is no place at all, because it is everywhere and nowhere, and it is still and silent and has neither beginning nor end and is not alien or foreign to me or outside of me. After years of searching, I have found my Soul Mate, and it is myself. The bachelor is content. Oh, he still dates women from time to time, and he listens to the wedding marches sometimes too. But only because he likes them.