"I need to find my soul mate."
Have you ever said, heard, or felt something like this before? Everlasting love is a theme in cultures around the world and one that’s especially prevalent in the New Church, where it’s often called conjugial or married love. Needing to find a soul mate implies that there is one out there—and that we need to be certain he or she is the right one; which leads us to a question: is there only one possible married partner for each of us or are there many? (I use the term “married partner” for what in broader culture might be called a “soul mate”.) So is there one or many? There are two very different answers to this question, depending upon whether we’re dealing with the Lord’s perspective or ours.
Let’s begin with the Lord’s perspective. In the work Married Love Emanuel Swedenborg sums up the perks of the ideal relationship: “the states produced by [true married] love are innocence, peace, tranquility, inmost friendship, complete trust, a mutual desire of the mind and heart to do the other every good… and, owing to an eternal enjoyment of states like this, the happiness of heaven” (180). Who doesn’t want that kind of love? True, it’s talking about something heavenly, but even though such bliss seems far away for many of us, to the Lord our eternal marriage is a present reality. Divine Providence says of the Lord: “all the future is present to Him and all the present is to Him eternal” (333). So for the Lord, there is only one eternal partner with whom each of us is dwelling forever. Case closed.
But then there’s our perspective. How many of us have wondered, Is she the one for me? Have I married the wrong person? Do I pass my soul mate commuting to work each morning and never know it? At first glance, these pressing questions may seem in harmony with the Lord’s perspective—if there’s only one right partner, then why not find him or her? Truly, there’s a lot to be said for finding the right person. But let’s be careful of the certainty demons that like to taint innocent hope: "if only I could be certain" often cloaks "if only I knew the future." It is one thing to hope for a good marriage; it is quite another to clutch at Divine omniscience. We simply can’t be God.
But we can be human, and humans are created free and rational by the Lord and must choose life as if of themselves (Divine Providence 286). Even though the Lord gives us our life, we are designed to flounder around in the water until we seemingly learn to swim on our own. If the Lord imposed His wise will on us—if He led us to “the right” partner without any as-of-self rational choice on our part—we would likely rebel against everything from Him, rejecting even the perfect partner. And so our perspective, our burden, our freedom-according-to-reason prerogative, requires us to select a spouse from scores of millions of eligible candidates.
As we freak out about the numbers, let’s consider the role of consent in marriage. How can we be certain we’ve chosen the right (i.e., eternal) partner? Try as we might, from our natural human perspective we can never be certain. But consider this tidbit of spiritual reality: “consent,” reads Married Love 21, “is the essential of marriage.” The word “essential” suggests that consent is spiritually inherent in marriage, and is even its heavenly core. Thus, the pool of potential partners dwindles dramatically when a man and a woman give their mutual consent to marry—and keep that contract throughout life. At this point, our merely human perspective, when influenced by spiritual ideas, begins to resemble the Divine perspective: there is only one possible partner—the one each of us marries.
I don’t propose to have solved anything—I didn’t even talk about love as a process, or the parallels between a person’s religion and marriage, or how to choose a partner from 100,000,000 possible candidates, or how angels don’t want to know the future. Still, as a Viking once said in the movie Prince Valiant, “God helps those who help themselves.” Never was it truer than in marriage. On earth we’ll never know for sure if the person we marry will be our partner to eternity. What we can rely on, however, is that the more we approach the Lord, the more we can experience our future as His present reality; we can give up the need for certainty about the right partner, confident that in loving the Lord with the person we marry, we are loving—and have found—our soul mate.