The majority of hopeless romantics out there believe in the concept of a soulmate - a single person who we are uniquely compatible with and for whom we're capable of feeling a deeper love than we are with any other human being. Being a hopeless romantic myself, this topic is near and dear to my heart - and a quest that I've personally explored for the majority of my life.
What I've discovered is that no one has the definitive answers. There are a lot of theories floating around. Some people believe we have one and only one soulmate while others believe that we have many and that each plays a role in a specific chapter of our lives. And while I've come across numerous methods of attracting your soulmate - ranging from rose quartz to love spells to daily affirmations - the following are the core ideas on the topic that I've uncovered over the years.
The Family of Souls
Back in the late 1980's, I came upon a rather complicated theory of the entire scenario. Essentially, the theory held that we are created as a family of souls and that we are reincarnated again and again with these people. Due to the nature of the creation. There are two people in our "family" that we are closer with than anyone else outside of our soulmate. These two people are referred to as our "soul twins" and, as the name implies, are similar to us in many ways, much as a twin brother or sister would be.
Each family of souls is connected to each other through a single connection. This connection is two souls that are literally two-halves of a greater whole. From the cosmic perspective of this theory, those two people are soulmates. Since everyone has a soulmate and each family of souls is connected by only one point, then if there are twelve souls in our family (as the theory suggested) then we are also connected to twelve other families, implying that throughout the expanse of time that there are 144 people with whom we share a special connection.
The theory goes on to suggest that as we move through our own personal growth and lessons in this life, that we will slowly draw nearer to our soulmate. This process holds three great relationships. The first is what is called our "compatible" - a person with whom we share a very close connection and could comfortably spend the rest of our lives with but who is "quite right" and would leave us settling for what our heart and instinct told us we really wanted. The second is our soulmate's soul twin - a relationship with one of the two people with whom our soulmate is most closely connected. The last is a relationship with our actual soulmate.
Finding Your Soulmate Through Personal Growth
An unbelievably wordy text written in the 1800's that I studied suggested that the only way to find our soulmate is through focusing on our own journey and our own personal growth. This concept was also alluded to in the theory of a family of souls.
At it's heart, the author presented the idea that the only reason we incarnate in this life is to learn and grow, a process that actually changes the "fabric" of our soul or spirit through a process known as "spiritual alchemy." Essentially, each experience - whether good or bad - influences who we are in ways that run the range from imperceptible to life-altering. This process will eventually encourage our growth until we reach a position where we've processed all of these lessons we need to learn. At that point we will naturally attract our soulmate into our lives.
You might question whether this process would be dependent upon whether your soulmate learned their lessons but, according to the author, you connection is so deep with your soulmate that their personal growth processes will mirror your own to some extent. In this manner, you're always equals.
Reunion at the End of the Journey
A third theory suggests that we won't necessarily connect with our soulmate, no matter how much work we do. This theory looks at life and reincarnation from a broader perspective, suggesting that our "real" life isn't here in this incarnation, but rather from the "other side" or in the spirit world. From this perspective, each lifetime is similar to a year in school. Since we don't normally take our spouses to class with us, it's not unusual for our soulmate to be absent from any given lifetime.
Under this scenario, there is nothing we can do to find our soulmate or attract them to us as they may not even be present in this lifetime. However, there this theory does hold the promise that we will be reunited with them in the afterlife.
The Best Approach
The commonality between the first two theories is the belief that we attract our soulmate through a process of spiritual and personal growth. If this is true, then none of the mundane concepts that our culture clings to (money, fame, physical beauty) have anything to do with finding our soulmate. Instead, we're forced to adopt an approach that would be essential to a healthy relationship - working through our issues and become whole and happy as a person.