“Soulmates.”

That word has come up quite a bit lately from the bloggers I follow. When Sadje posted the above picture from Jonah Pettrich at Unsplash on her latest What Do You See prompt, the word “soulmates” immediately came to mind. Well, actually, “lovebirds” came to mind first. But then when I saw that the first question Melanie asked in her Share Your World post this past Monday was about soulmates, “soulmates” shot to the top.

Melanie had also asked about soulmates in her May 6, 2019 Share Your World post. And if that’s not enough, just a few weeks ago, Shweta Suresh had “soulmate” as her word for her Saturday Six Word Story Prompt.

And now, Stephanie Colpron has given us the word “soulmates” in her latest Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver prompt.

She’d like us to consider the concept of “soulmates.” She suggested our tale could be about our soulmate or our character’s soulmate if we decide to write a fictional story.

My story is about a man who didn’t believe that there was such a thing as a soul, so the whole notion of “soulmates” was foreign to him. He firmly believed that people looking for their soulmate, allegedly finding them, and potentially marrying them, was more a product of time, place, and opportunity than of anything so idealistic and romantic as locating their ideal partner.

This skeptical man was, many years ago, introduced to a woman who happened to be “geographically compatible” (i.e., they lived in the same city), and both of them were at a point in time in their lives where they were ready to commit to another via marriage.

This man was convinced that there were other women who could have been his partner in life, but either he didn’t know them because they lived in different parts of the country (or world), and/or because one or both of them was not ready for a lifelong commitment.

Still, when he found that geographically compatible woman who, like him, was ready for a long term commitment, he decided, soulmate or not, that he would pop the question. And she said yes.

That was forty-five years ago and, I guess one could argue that the two of them have grown to become each other’s soulmate.