We are not incomplete human beings, and there is no one in the world who is going to fill the voids of our soul other than ourselves.

In reality, there is more to forever than simply finding someone who you feel extremely connected to. We have to stop allowing this surge of feeling to act like a compass towards healthy relationships. Distinctive and enchanting feelings for someone are a great compass, but they shouldn’t be the only thing we take into account when falling in love. We can’t keep striving for this absolute, perfect love, because when life throws some less than perfect situations we are going to need more than exhilaration. We are going to need pragmatic love, we are going to need levelheadedness, we are going to need a person who fights for us every single day–who chooses us in spite of circumstances.

Soul mates don’t exist. Real human beings do. The goal is to redefine this idea of the perfect kind of love, and turn it into an openness to a very real kind of love. You aren’t going to find someone who completes you, and you shouldn’t strive for that. Instead, strive to find someone who inspires you to complete yourself. Strive to find someone who pushes you, and breaks into you in ways that allow for you to see all of the potential that exists within your bones. Strive to find someone who your loves grows with –slowly, strongly. Strive to find someone who ignites within you the motivation to love in the most enduring of ways because, luckily, that kind of person does exist. — P108, Seeds Planted in Concrete (book), Poetry by Bianca Sparacino

I think this idea of finding someone to complete you is just something some of us are constantly being fed on. Nevertheless, I feel grateful that through the vicarious lens I am seeing things from, I was conscious enough not to fall for this trap though I can’t recall exactly whose experiences lead me to this realization. I know I have read it from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People but I only paid attention to this book in 2020 but my subconscious prompts about this being whole first before finding someone else had been there ages before 2020. I guess soulmates do exist, but we just don’t have to necessarily pinned them as the perfect kind of love—the one who we should end up with, call THE ONE or something. I just realized that there are actually different kinds of love in this world. || In my giving birth (again) to my real self journey || August 2021-April 2022 ||

—marymancee