predestination?

Over at Livejournal, the WeirdJews community has been discussing the concept of a bashert, or soulmate. I’m not convinced I believe in the idea of a soulmate at all; I most certainly don’t believe that there’s one true Jewish man who is the only possible soulmate for me. For one thing, the logistics are overwhelmingly forbidding. (What if he was born in Timbuktu? What if we met in an elevator and didn’t recognize each other? What if he got run over by a truck? What if he was destined to be my soulmate but his maternal grandmother was hidden by a Gentile family as a child in the Holocaust and converted, so that he wasn’t born Jewish? What if he became a transexual? And so on.)

The other problem I have with the idea of soulmates is that the implication that all you have to do is to find the right person and then all is happily-ever-after is, I am convinced, responsible for a lot of divorces. Any serious relationship succeeds only with a lot of work from the parties involved.

And yet, and yet … the thing that surprised me when Rudder and I first moved in together was how easy he was to live with. I’d lived with my family first, of course, and had an assortment of roommates and housemates during college (12 total – I lived in some big houses, my last year and a half). He was easier to cohabit with than any of them, by a long shot.

The other thing that surprised when, when I got to thinking about it a while later, was how easy monogamy was for me. I expected more self-discipline to be needed, but there was no real temptation, even though in general I like change and variety in most things. We’ve been together now for over 17 years unofficially, married for 14 today, and neither of those things has changed any.

So while I think the idea of basherts, in the most traditional description, is highly unlikely (especially for a society that depended on matchmakers to arrange marriages between total strangers) I can’t quite rule out the concept entirely. I do wonder …

Happy 14th anniversary to us!