On The Subject of "Soul Mates"

On The Subject of “Soul Mates”Obviously some time has passed since my last entry; all I have been able to think about lately is my steamrolling progress on the We are Voulhire series, and after that it will be time to finish the Turn series. Still, difficult as it can be to remember where I am, I find myself trying to think of ways to keep my readers in touch with my humanity. I might have found a way to incorporate both by touching on a hyper-specific aspect of my world-building.

It might be apparent, whether you’ve read my books or casually perused their descriptions, that I take philosophy into account of my storytelling. That is not to say all aspects of my worlds reflect what I believe (sometimes quite the opposite); instead, my worlds are constructed by the consideration of possibilities.

Voulhire features its own “spirit world,” and as such I am often forced to approach the haze that separates right and wrong, to decide for my world what is and what is not, and to stick to it. Sure, it’s easy to be vague, especially early on, but world-building is layering, and new bricks cannot be added until the lower ones have dried.

In a story where lovers meet and lose each other under the canopy of my personal Heaven, one of the decisions I had to make concerns the subject of soul mates, particularly as it pertains to “falling in love again” after the death of a spouse. It’s a dilemma that has always confounded me.

Years ago, I was reading the book of Mark like a good little Christian boy. There came a chapter where a small gathering of Sadducees approached Christ and asked him, “If a woman marries a man, then she dies, then she marries another man and he dies, and then another...” and so on, pressing Christ, “When she dies, to which man is she now married?”

I should note for fairness that there was a whole dynamic as to why the Sadducees asked this question (they rejected Christ’s belief in an afterlife), so I’m only seeing one angle of what was designed to be one of those ‘gotcha’ questions.

Still, I don’t think Christ was lying when he responded, “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in Heaven.”

This disturbed me; it forced me to think feverishly outside of my comfort zone.

Was Christ asserting that there is no romantic affection once we die? Is he saying there is no sex in heaven?
Maybe.

But if marriage and romance are things that simply end as we pass from this lesser world, why the emphasis on monogamy and fidelity? Christ was all about ridding the temple of superfluous traditions, yet the sanctity of marriage was important to Him. I assume a lot, as is often necessary in Biblical interpretations, but how do I find the truth in all of it?

I find myself looking back on a story-driven computer game I played a while ago, called “Always Sometimes Monsters.” In this game, there is a scene where an old woman tells a heartfelt story about her simple life with the man she married, how she loved him, and how he had died when they were still young.

The player character asks this old woman why she never remarried.

The woman went on to opine that, once the universe has presented you with your destined partner, it will never give you another.

Many people might call this a bleak style of life, a self-condemning devotion that could last for decades. And there was a part of me that agreed with this. It did seem bleak. It did seem lonely. It did seem hopeless.

Why, then, did I find comfort in it?

I thought back to the chapter from Mark.

“They are like angels in Heaven.”

We do not live there as we do here.

It was then that I realized I was the one with the bleak outlook. In my focus on this life, driven by my fear of death, I had fallen into nihilism, even though I never identified as a nihilist.

The old woman had not condemned herself to loneliness; she was blessed with anticipation, knowing her soul mate was waiting for her.

Okay, so I started feeling better... but that wasn’t quite the end of it.

If the old woman’s conclusion could be interpreted in tandem with the philosophy presented by Mark, there would have been a more fleshed-out take on Christ’s opinion of remarriage after death; more specifically, whether a person should remarry at all.

But there isn’t; that brief moment in Mark is the one instance the subject comes up.

Strange. Emphasis on marriage, only to be rid of it at death...

Thinking fictitiously (which an idealist with OCD often has to do to maintain sanity), perhaps the purpose of a spousal relationship, from the perspective of the “spirit world,” is to preserve the mental health of the individual by containing sex, but not necessarily to bind two soulmates.

So is it possible? Can it be that marriage and soulmates do not always coincide? Is it possible to be ‘ensouled’ to a person in whom you are not sexually or even romantically interested?

Could this have been what Jesus truly meant?

It’s no Vatican secret that there are people out there whose spousal relationship is, however healthy, not the most important relationship to them (despite an array of social, cultural, and religious inundations that it should be). For some, their most important relationship is to a blood relative, or a best friend; some people look at marriage with justified cynicism; some people are not driven by sex; some people are driven only by sex. Are they all wrong for this? Or is their personal perspective of “importance” even a factor in the binding of their souls?

Maybe sex is exclusive to the physical and maybe romance is as well. But in telling a story, I default to what is the most fun (and maybe there is a real-world lesson to be learned in that). It is fun to believe that romance (at the very, very least) comes with us when we depart. But as things fall together in the multiverse of Voulhire, I try my best to keep myself aware of the gray particles still adrift about its construct, and the extremes to which I may have to go in order to set them in place.