Q: Does God have your soul mate planned out for you? If so, how do you find him/her? It seems that some people are just fortunate enough to find someone with whom they share a mutual attraction and love.
A: We might think that finding the right marriage partner was a haphazard undertaking if all we had to go on was the famous song Snow White sings in the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “Someday my prince will come,” she croons glowingly. But there’s no telling when “someday” will be, or how this supremely happy union with a nameless prince will ever come about!
As a teen, I thought it was much more reliable to think of companionship and marriage the way my aunt, a Christian Science practitioner, explained it to me. “Get your future marriage established in thought, right now!” she said. What she meant was that I needed to live, starting right then, the qualities I wanted to see in my marriage—like tenderness, compassion, affection, joy, purity, integrity, soulfulness, intelligence, loyalty, beauty, spontaneity, spirituality, reverence for God. That made sense to me. If I nurtured those qualities in my own life, it would be easier to identify them in people I might date. And expressing those attributes would make me more interesting to people who cultivated those same qualities. We’d have a kind of moral and spiritual kinship that would be a basis for friendship—and maybe more.
