The age old, cliche of a question... Do you believe in soulmates? The answer is so much deeper than the question.
First, are souls even reincarnated from one body to the next? If so, how do you explain population increase? New souls? For every new soul, there must be two. For every brand new tweedle dee there must be a brand new tweedle dumb. Maybe bodies walking around without souls? That would explain sociopaths, psychopaths, and the Kardashians.
What about souls that don't come back as people? If you are bad at life and you come back as a slug, do you still have a soulmate? Is that soulmate also a slug? Does one have to do the penance of the other along with them if one fucks up at life and the other doesn't? Or is it possible that the one who didn't fuck up gets to come back as a person and try again, but the offending soul still has to do time as a slug? So the person who did good goes through an entire life looking for their soulmate and all along, it's a slug. By the time the slug works its way up the food chain, it's late in the life of the good soul, who is now a poor soul, ready to leave its body, having never found their true soulmate. Maybe in the next life they will meet again and do right by each other. Maybe it'll be several lives. Because let's face it, how do you be a good slug? How do you go from slug to bypassing the food chain & coming back as a person? So the good soul has to wait, life after life, constantly without a soulmate, always being good, and always in a state of waiting for that stupid slug to catch up. That seems unfair.
OR....is it possible that souls reincarnated are not from one body to the next, but from many bodies to many more bodies? Bits of souls combining together and manifesting into a person, or a slug, or whatever, like cells, churning around and sticking together, multiplying, and growing into bigger, badder, freakier, Frankenstein souls with bits of slug, and bits of dog, and bits of different people and anything else that might've got caught in the swirl... All combined to make a new soul, a new person, a new slug, or dog or whatever. It's not how many times around you've been around, but how many beings you are made out of.
OR.....is reincarnation of the soul even a real thing? Is it possible we only get one shot? We don't get to come back, try again, meet our soulmate in the next life. This is it, you get a very limited amount of time, in the big picture, to spend with your soulmate if you are even lucky enough to find them, if you even have one! That thought will drive a person to desperation, they'll settle for any soulmate they can find, just to have one. Like musical chairs or duck-duck-goose, you better grab one before you're the last soul standing. You poor, lonely soul! That's the recipe for long, painful marriages, and emotionally wrecked beyond repair relationships that people stay in, guiltily beating their dead horses, because that's their fregging soulmate, goddammit, it's worth all the heartache and bullshit to stay in this crazy hell of a relationship to be with this person who drives them insane, because then at least they don't have to go their one trip around life alone. They still have to go lonely, just not alone.
OR.....is there even any such thing as a soul? Is it fear of death, turning to dust, having nothing left, and no second chance that frightens us? If we do have souls...Why are we all so sure we are old souls? Why are we all so obsessed with youthful exteriors and old souls? And why are so many people so sure they are the reincarnation of someone great? No one is ever like, yep, I musta been a middle class desk jockey, living in the suburbs with a spouse, 3 grossly under-emotionally-nurtured kids, and a golden retriever, and it was either the diabetes, the chain smoking, or excessive alcoholism that killed me, but I had life insurance so..... Nope. Nobody ever claims to have been that person. Maybe souls are just like jewelry, we pick one out and wear it around our necks to show what kind of person we wish we were, what kind of soul we wish we had. But really it's just an accessory, and a symbol. Like a cross on a chain, or a Gucci emblem encrusted in diamonds. A soul is just a symbol of something we want to believe in, something we want to have. And many try to pass fake ones off as the real thing, that's how badly they want others to believe in them too. We want to believe in ourselves, and be proud of who we are, and so much of our own history, our identity is lost to our hedonistic present that we really don't know who we are, so we fantasize about it. We fake it and hope everyone believes it. Gives us a greater sense of self to believe we have an old soul, or a Godly soul, or even a Gucci soul, or any soul at all. But just like God and Gucci, once you've touched the real thing, you can spot a fake a mile away. Which is what makes the term "old soul" such an eye-rolling cliche, and as tacky as a fake Gucci.
The truth is, I have no idea if soulmates exist, but much like God, I hope it does, and much like Gucci, I wouldn't tolerate a fake one.
