Like the sequential flashing of traffic lights, guiding us to stop, caution or go, it seems love and commitment are regulated in that very same way.
The idea is simple. When someone is ready to commit, an invisible green light will flash impatiently over his or her head, urging them to quickly act before time runs out. If someone has been stung or disinterested in romantic companionship, a stubborn red light will penetrate the air above, cautioning distance despite anxious partners attempts to blind themselves from it.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe my experiences with love have made a cynic of me but I am more prepared to believe in this theory over the idea of soul mates.
The latest global census has shown that there are just fewer than seven billion people out there. All with attractive hearts, inquisitive minds and looks to boot. So how is this soul mates idea functional?
Are we strategically placed in a certain place at a certain time by fate or a higher entity to meet with Mr. Right? Is there a magnetic or cosmic pull that draws like minds and compatible hearts together?
Or, are we versatile beings, suitable for more than one person when the time or circumstance is just right?
My suspicions and experience seems to confirm so. There have been endless times where a friend or myself seem to have found the right person. He is perfect – intelligent, attractive, charismatic and wide open to love.
You go on a couple of dates with this guy. He cheekily rubs ice cream across your nose as you walk, entangled in one another and kisses the crane of your neck as the waiter turns to take your hardly touched meals.
You do this for weeks. Things seem perfect. You have met his parents as he begins to make plans for the two of you in the not-so-distant-future. Just when you think you are heading toward the next step of commitment…
Bam!
Something changes. You don’t know. How could you know? Ten minutes ago you were eating his mother’s home baked goods and now you’ve been launched out in the cold, without hesitation or an explanation.
Your girlfriends will tell you he is a jerk, he will tell you ‘it’s not you it’s me’ but maybe the truth of it is, his light had stopped shining that bright, hopeful green. Instead, something inside of him changed and with it came that red beaming light, enclosed by a hardwood moat.
These are the hardest break ups to understand because you cannot pin point what you did wrong or why it happened. You will pine, beg, bargain and plead; all for a lost cause with little chance of resuscitation.
I say this as someone with experience. Having dated someone who I had thought to be Mr. Right for a couple of months, I was in a loved up haze that seemed endless.
But something changed and I was abruptly pulled from this misty world, into a dull reality, which saw the exchange of my Prince for Connoisseur ice cream and my SATC friends Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha.
After much advice, teary nights and subdued days, I reclaimed my life and began to forget the guy who quickly flooded into my life, leaving stains that only time could fix.
As the months drew by, his interest in me seemed to have rekindled, alongside his willingness to commit.
While I appreciatively declined this fine suitor, I have no doubt in my mind that he and I would have worked together. We were alike yet different, romantically attracted with a playful underlying friendship.
My thoughts are that over the time we spent apart, something inside of him had changed and his light began to flash green again.
The same can be said of that One Great Love we choose to spend the rest of our lives with. Are we choosing or being chosen with our hearts or under the pressure of urgent clock hands?
I am in a long-term, loving relationship. My partner is seven years older than me and while I know our love is genuine, and potentially lasting, I often wonder if the same could be said if we met at an earlier stage in his life.
Was it that his green light had begun to shine and I was the first compatible person in its reaches? Would we be otherwise strangers in a different time or place? Had he, over his lifetime, dismissed others that would now be his perfect match?
I believe there are many people out there that could make us happy and potentially spend the rest of our lives with. It is, however, fate that chooses if or when we meet these people, and if it happens to be at the right time, when our lights are shining warmly on one another, the rest is up to us.
Image credit: Kathryn Sprigg
