As mentioned above, people *love* the idea of meeting their soulmate without effort (and maintaining those relationships without effort.) They love the idea of everything just “working out”. But the happiest relatioships that I’ve ever seen, happened with people who (rightly) should have never met.

Africans and Asians.
Europeans and pacific islanders.
Hispanics with Teutonic people.
Hawaiians (white, of irish lineage) with Russians.
Etc.

People who met their soulmates through circumstances so convoluted, they don’t even make sense. I worked with a black man from Alabama who met his (considerably better off) wife in Kazakhstan. A decade in, theyre still together. I met a Filipina carouseler who stepped off the ride without regrets when she met her (exceedingly Christian) husband, no hint of scandal since the day their eyes met in 2000. I met a son of Nazis, who’s been married to his very-black, very unsophisticated wife for years; and another son of Nazi defectors who treats his right-wing Polish wife like spun silver. Hell, look at James Carville and Marlee Matlin!

Even Chris Rock makes jokes about it, the Israeli who falls in love with a Palestinian or the (contextually speaking) higher class black man who falls for a black woman. The error re: soulmates, isn’t that it’s impossible, its that the circumstances behind meeting them are so difficult that attaching your romantic hopes on meeting them are foolish. What happens when the person to whom you hold the strongest connection is a guy, and you’re a guy, and the only reason for ever meeting each other was based on the fact that she was two-timing to both of you and both of you love the pussy? Or when you’re 53 years old and your missing puzzle piece won’t even hit *16* until your foot is dangling over the grave? Or when your “one and only” is a first or second cousin? The Mona Lisa is still claiming the hearts of various men, despite the fact that the model has been dead for 500 years! But people are supposed to believe that their “eternally hot (to me, and vice versa), eternally faithful (to me, and vice versa), eternally interesting (to me, and vice versa) and guaranteed to die within days if not hours of my death” soulmate is going to be found without trying (or if you just try *hard* enough, travel *far* enough, hop on enough cocks, “oneitis” that one person for long enough…) Yeah, right. I won’t even go into all of the “perfect for each couples” I’ve known who didn’t work out because of one little indiscretion (this is a Mano

Or can we not for once escape rational censure and read it as nothing other than an inevitable part of our romantic destiny?

What a difference it is to read a passage like this. Eloquent, deep, concise and precise. It tells us in passing what we want to know – a soul mate is someone who fathoms our soul. And it explains and justifies our feelings. A stark contrast with the kind of claptrap you read here where everything is a myth or a delusion and we’re all in the fucking matrix. “Schemas” for fuck’s sake.

The desire for sexual satisfaction, stability, and security is at play here. The stability and security are the ends achieved by institutions like marriage and by civilization.

Feeling “entitled to” a good sexual partner makes sense from a biological standpoint. Since reproduction is the end result of the sex drive, this feeling, this drive, creates a sense of “entitlement” in the same way that we feel we have a right to basic necessities of survival like food and water.