My Husband Isn't My Soul Mate Either

This blog post is a response to another blog post I read called My Husband is Not My Soul Mate.  Take time to read it.  It's pretty awesome.  She starts off building a background on the perpetration of the soul mate idea in Christian churches:

Do you remember those awesome Evangelical 90’s/ early 2000’s where Jesus was kind of like our boyfriend and we all kissed dating good-bye because we just knew that God was going to bring us THE ONE and then life would be awesome? ... We would know that he was THE ONE because of his plethora of WWJD bracelets and because (duh) he had also kissed dating goodbye and was waiting for me, strumming Chris Tomlin songs on his guitar as he stared into whatever campfire was nearby. We would get married and it would be awesome FOREVER. If you were like me, in devote preparation for this moment, you wrote letters to your future spouse, preferably in a leather bound journal dotted with your overwhelmed tears.

The fact of the matter is that there is a small part of us that wants to hold on to that idea of a perfect mate, someone who will be so obscenely compatible with us, it will be disgusting. 

But that isn't reality.

How Kissing Dating Goodbye Affected My Marriage

There was a book I read in middle school called I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris.  Harris preludes the book on his website by saying: "I was 21-years old when I wrote my story of giving up the dating game in order to focus on serving God."

At the time (circa 1997), the book took the Christian world by storm.  I read it along with some of my girlfriends and soaked it up as an impressionable thirteen-year-old.  I wanted to be pure, and I wanted to be good in God's eyes.

Following that book, I was inundated with messages encouraging me to save myself for marriage, to dress modestly, to be wary of dating, thinking of my future husband.  While I know all of the messages (as well as their senders) were well-intentioned and earnest, at my age and with my little experience in the world of boys and girls, not much of it translated in a healthy way.