Soul Mates
- Dr. Tom Wagner
- Jun 21
- 6 min read
What if a soul mate isn’t just “the one,” but one of the many people who help you feel at home in your own life? This reflection explores the sacred gift of the soul mate pod.
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Soul Mates
“Soul mate.” “My person.” “My one and only.” I’m not sure a marriage and family professional, strictly speaking, can make a case for the use of such flamboyant vocabulary. How would a hardcore researcher even begin to construct the kind of tight, quantitative methodology needed to capture such a thing in the wild? Could blood samples reveal the necessary, dual threshold levels of oxytocin sufficient to justify such a term of art? Or could a schedule of behavioral exchange pass muster in a clinical psych lab? David Sedaris isn’t a researcher, but he’s a pretty good humorist. He captures the problem this way: “Out of billions of people on Earth, the idea that exactly one matches you perfectly—and just happens to live in your apartment complex is statistically absurd.” Hard to argue with that logic.
Hard to argue with it, unless you happen to find yourself in a relationship where no other term fits the happy accident into which you’ve stumbled. When you find yourself in such miraculous territory, suddenly verifiable arguments don’t seem to matter that much anyway. Pretty quickly, interest in, or the language of, statistical measurements falls away, replaced with either good poetry (think of the song, “Something,” by former Beatle, George Harrison) or bad poetry (think of the song, “Silly Love Songs,” by former Beatle, Paul McCartney).
Back in my single days, I ran plenty of failed experiments on this topic. Just before a permanent cynicism settled in on my celibate soul, along came Lisa, and “the rest,” as they say, “is history,” or “her-story,” or “our-story.” Soul mate (question mark)? Checkmate (exclamation point)! The matter has been fully settled in my gooey, non-scientific heart for over thirty years now.
But here’s the thing I discovered on the weekend of my mom’s funeral. Probably more accurate to say, “here’s something that I named.” Come to find out, a guy can have—and maybe should try to have—more than one soul mate! It hit me when my cousin, Ari, asked me when I’d be finished with all my busy work in the kitchen, so she could read me something she’d written. Everything about that exchange, and what came next, was so familiar!
Introducing Ari & Tom
Born just a few months after me, also the middle child of a huge family, I can’t remember a before when it comes to Ari. Her family (my dad’s brother’s family) would come and stay with us for a week or two every summer, especially after we moved onto Lake Springfield in Illinois. It wasn’t uncommon for us, during those visits, to set an alarm for two in the morning, and then rendezvous at the agreed-upon spot down by the lake, out of earshot and eyeshot of all the bodies slumbering on floors and couches up at the house. Once we’d both arrived at our meet-up, we’d empty our pockets of purloined cigarettes: Aunt Anne’s Silva Thins, Mom’s Salem Lights, Dad’s Marlboros. Frequently, we’d just sit, smoke, and talk until just before first light. Other times, we’d launch ourselves on a moonlit canoe ride. Eventually, we’d sneak back into the house, full of toxic chemicals, but also full of something ineffable, something wholesome and soul-satisfying.
A photo of Ari in first grade, followed by a picture with our shared grandmother. Ari is the grandchild to her right. I am to her left. My dad’s brother is next to her.
In the Gloaming of Mom’s Sunset
The week before last, just after mom’s funeral, we didn’t set any alarms. We didn’t rendezvous. We weren’t even clandestine about it. After finishing up my kitchen futzing, Ari and I just followed what seemed to be a kind of familiar gravitational pull to walk down to the lake (my sister Mary, who was hosting the post-funeral gathering, now lives on Lake Springfield). Over our shoulders, familiar old taunts accompanied our footfalls, “There go Tom and Ari again!” “I guess we won’t be seeing them for the rest of the night!” Back in the day, we’d be so embarrassed to be opposite-gendered best friends. In the youth of our old age, we proudly wore those familiar words like an old, welcomed sweater that fit the both of us just right.
Once settled at the end of my sister’s dock, Ari pulled up her writing that was as much a prayer as a poem. The gentle lapping of Lake Springfield on the rip-rap of the shore provided the musical accompaniment to turn Ari’s poetry into a kind of beautiful song. It’d be easy to poke fun at the aroma of Lake Springfield if you were anybody but Ari and me. To us, this was the perfume of our childhood together, and it was all around us, and in us as she read. The just-before-sunset light was painting the waxy leaves of shoreline oaks and boxelders a stippled gold. Some lake-swallows flew like airborne, acrobatic dolphins. It seemed to me that they were singing Bob Marley’s song about how “every little thing is going to be alright.” Our conversation wove in and out like the flight patterns of those swallows. From the perspective of my central nervous system and my soul, it could have been 2026; then again, it could have been 1976.
Looking back on it, this is how it would always go. I wouldn’t see or talk to Ari for over a year—and more than sometimes—many years. But sure enough, whenever we’d get back together, there has always been a picking it up right where we’d left it. It’s always been like we somehow find our way to the inner Eastern Australian Current that we share together. Once there, it has always been just a matter of going where the flow takes us. There’s an effortlessness to it.
It seems to me that maybe that’s the main feature of being soul mates. There’s a quality of giftedness to it, like it’s a blessing more than a thing that you have to work at. This isn’t to say one would never have to work at it. It’s just to say, “work” or “effort” is nowhere near the main ingredient. The astounding gift of it is the main thing.
I want to notice something else that my time with Ari revealed. To put it into the language of the spiritual tradition in which I was raised, you can’t define a thing called “soul mate,” because there’s an unlimited quality to the soul, that by definition, is indefinable. The best you can do is to attempt to explain the experience of it. Or rather, you can attempt to savor the experience of it. I suppose that’s why I wanted to take you, my reader, out to the end of the dock with my cousin and me…so that you could smell, see, hear, and feel the experience of Ari and me.
And speaking of that “boundless quality” to the soul, it seems to me that there are many different species of soul mates in a given life. When my daughter, Lizzie, asked Ari to describe our lifelong friendship, Ari summed it up like this: “We’re cousin-soul mates.” I think she hit the nail on the head. Earlier, I shared with you my experience that Lisa is my spouse-soul mate. On most Thursday mornings, I get coffee with my pal, Mitch. He’s a friend-soul mate. I agree with the scholar, Mirabai Starr. In her book, Ordinary Mysticism, she makes the claim that, rather than being confined to one soul mate, our expansive souls want to go through life with a whole pod of them.
Some Questions for Discussion or Quiet Meditation
Who would you say have been your soul mates over the years? Through the various periods of your life, have some of them changed? Do you believe that a person could have been a soul mate even though they no longer are?
To give you a flavor of my relationship with Ari, I had to take you viscerally into a concrete experience. If you had to describe your relationship with just one of those people from your soul mate pod, what experience would you choose to give your listener a feel for that relationship?
As you reflect upon one of your soul mate relationships, try to identify how that relationship has changed you.
How has that relationship enhanced your other relationships and commitments?
Please share with the SMC community your thoughts and/or reflections in the comments below.
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