Spiritual bonding
A “soul mate”, is defined by Wikipedia as “someone with whom we feel a deep, natural sense of kinship.” Soul mate is an undefined and romantic term in psychology, but one of the key characteristics is a relationship that allows you to experience “spiritual bonding”.
Spiritual bonding means that you can actually find a rare high degree of similarity to yourself in another individual. Due to similarities and coincidences in genes, environment and experience, there are significant differences in the degree of natural compatibility and match between people. In other words, there are people in the crowd with whom we are more attuned and more likely to connect.
A soul mate can also give you some deep insights and reflections – which are often exactly what each other wants or is struggling with. This suggests that soulmates tend to be on the same intellectual and cognitive level – able to think on the same level and able to fully understand each other’s expressions.
This spiritual bond is different from the emotional bond. Emotional bonding is when we get emotional comfort and pleasure from being around someone. Just because we have an emotional connection with a person doesn’t mean we have a spiritual bond with them. Spiritual bonding is more elusive, not something that can be achieved with hard work, but it requires some effort to some extent.
Connected in love
This “love” includes “deep attachment,” “extreme affection,” and “pure blessing,” but not necessarily the sexual desire of romantic love according to an academic research by W Bradford Wilcox and Jeffrey Drew. At the same time, soulmates don’t have the practical complexities of more common, life-like relationships.
For example, when we view a person as our soul mate, we rarely take into account practical factors such as domestic life. It is this lack of attention to the trivial and practical aspects of life that makes us less likely to become disillusioned with our soul mates.
It’s important to note that when people are talking about soulmates that don’t exist by standard definition, they’re probably talking about them within a threshold say Wilcox and Drew. In other words, different people call different levels of connection “soul mates.” This is also related to people’s own social level. The more easily people can connect spiritually with others, the less likely they are to feel like they’ve met their soul mate.
Why do we crave a soul mate?
In all of us, there is a side that is hard to describe. If it is not seen, we are left with a loneliness and emptiness that cannot be filled. The emptiness comes from feeling that we don’t exist as a whole “I,” which is a discounting of existence.
And it is only when this part is seen and interacted with that “being” becomes alive – we feel the real and definite existence of ourselves. We really cannot escape our need to be a real and complete self.
In this sense, a soul mate is someone who sees the hidden side of the other, which can alleviate our existential loneliness to a great extent.
How to deal with the relationship between spiritual partner and life partner?
People’s attitudes toward their soulmates generally fall into two categories:
The first group believes that a soulmate is a goal that can occur with a life partner or in a different relationship. The luckiest thing of course is that they happen to be the same person, but that’s a small chance.
If they are separated, you have to decide whether your life partner is more important or your soul partner is more important – and this may vary at different times.When you are young, in school, with lots of playmates, you will give up the people around you for your soulmate. But if you become lonely, you may feel that the comfort of the soul can not fill the social side of life.
The other depends on the attitude of your life partner. They may be able to circumvent the existence of a soul mate. After all, human emotions are hard to categorise, and no matter what kind of emotion they are, it always comes down to the question of ‘who’s more important’.
But if a life partner is mature enough to understand that life is too long for two people to meet all of each other’s needs on their own, they may not mind having a soul mate.
The other is firmly artificial. The division between the spiritual and emotional worlds is never clear-cut – they are forever intertwined. They argue that there should be no life partner without soulmate attributes – the difference may simply be the proportion of the two attributes in the person.
They believe that each of us has more than one choice of possible partners, some of whom are a little more life partner, some of whom are a little more soul mate. You end up balancing what you want, what fits you, and what comes your way. Which side are you on.