When we believe that someone was our soulmate, yet the relationship didn’t work, it throws us into a tailspin. Whatever our ideas about what a soulmate constitutes, our experience doesn’t reflect how we believe things should be. The outcome contradicts our beliefs. It should have worked out. We should still be together. We should have been able to overcome any challenges and incompatibilities.
Sometimes the relationship with our perceived soulmate is also our most painful one. The loss and disappointment spark profound grief, confusion and disillusionment, especially when we equate ‘soulmate’ with The One and Only. Even more so when the underlying current of the ‘soulmateship’ was the pursuit of fulfilling old unmet needs.
But what if we view our interpersonal relationships as learning vehicles that help us to heal, grow and learn so that we, not just overcome our past but become more of who we really are and move forward to a relationship more befitting of us?
Allowing ourselves to grieve helps us find deeper meaning in what we perceive as the ‘failed’ soulmateship.
If we consider that we all show each other aspects of ourselves and our pasts, we see that some people come into our life (and us theirs) with the ‘job’ of bringing us closer to confronting ourselves. They show us what we couldn’t see before. The experience holds a mirror up to, for instance, the pain, fear and guilt we carry about our unmet needs and wounds from childhood. Blind spots, patterns are revealed.
And if we’re, whether consciously or not, avoiding intimacy, then guess what? Our relationships can gradually crack us wide open because we’re more truthful.
The teaching of the experience isn’t one-sided, and it’s on an unconscious level. It’s not as if each person receives a mysterious package with their next relationship assignment from an overseer they’ve never met, with each party bound not to reveal the contents. We don’t know what our ‘mission’ is or what each party will come out of an exchange with.
It’s easy to wonder, Well, if they have the ‘job’ of forcing me to confront something, what’s my ‘job’? The same thing. We don’t need to get granular or even controlling about it. We don’t need to be like, Well, I showed them XYZ and all I got out of it was a lousy keychain.
Breaking up with someone that we thought was our soulmate throws everything into question. We lose faith for a while. It’s why we might feel aggrieved if they move on first or that they’re not getting the karma we think they should. It might pain us that they might be happy, albeit in a different way to the best of what it was when we were together. Hell, our deepest fear might be that they might become a better person in a better relationship, negating our perception of things.
When we consider relationships on a deeper level, they are reciprocal experiences, but the results, including the depths of learning for each party, will vary. And, of course, we are not someone’s only lesson (or us theirs), plus we all evolve at different speeds and come from different levels of awareness.
Ultimately, we must check in with ourselves about what ‘soulmate’ means, including whether it’s what we equate with destabilisation. If we accept the possibility that the soulmateship isn’t the end of the road for us, we’ll make way for more meaning, including new relationships.
I’ve been running Baggage Reclaim since September 2005, and I’ve spent many thousands of hours writing this labour of love. The site has been ad-free the entire time, and it costs hundreds of pounds a month to run it on my own. If what I share here has helped you and you’re in a position to do so, I would love if you could make a donation. Your support is so very much appreciated! Thank you.
Copyright Natalie Lue 2005-2025, All rights reserved. Written and express permission along with credit is needed to reproduce and distribute excerpts or entire pieces of my work.
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