Dating : A Soulmate Vs. A Twin Flame

My phone buzzed exactly four times. In all my years of suffering from critical insomnia, that could only mean one thing- best friend alert! As I opened the chat rather subliminally, I saw unusually long messages from my childhood best friend, who currently resides in a different continent and is clearly not the one to bother about the differences in time zones. She was frantically excited to share the nuances of a psychic reading she recently encountered in a small village near Boston.

Before, I could shake myself into concentration, she said ‘And here’s the most shocking part of it all, you and I are twin energies according to American telepathic astrology’. Now, she had my full attention.

As I read through rather long texts requiring perfect mindfulness, ignoring the fact that she had readily spent $25 on a sea-side gypsy, the hair on my arms got alerted quickly. She explained to me the concepts of ‘Twin flames’ and ‘Soulmates’ as per American “bat-shit voodoo” (as I prefer to call the profession).

Twin flame as I was informed is a person who comes into your life for a purpose. The purpose being, to disrupt your happiness. She went on to relate her own life trajectory to this reading and it made perfect sense! This is not the crazy part.

Deeply engrossed in this virtual conversation, she said that the gypsy had a prediction for the longest standing ‘sister’ in her life too- Me. The gypsy said that when her (my bff) and I met, we set off a chain of events (a reaction) in each others life. That reaction would lead to the both of us finding our twin flames at around the same time. Twin flames that would make our lives difficult- Very difficult! This is also, not the crazy part.

This conjecture although being absolutely unfounded and uncorroborated, uncannily struck a note of resemblance in both of our minds. Now, I was starting to doubt all my years of legal study based on logic and reason and argumentation. She continued to tell me how the connection with a ‘twin flame’ is not just emotionally taxing but also change-inducing-in the form of more anger, more pain, more conflict, more mental challenges, more vulnerabilities, more drama. That a Twin flame causes agony in ways you cannot control, was the undertone of the rest of our dialogue. This is still not the crazy part.

Continuing to carry our preposterous burdensome revelations, we spoke about the respective twin flames of our lives in a rather neutral light. She divulged, that there is only one twin flame that you come across your entire life, which was a kind of a relief (to know that the worst possible traumas were possibly behind us). But then, a word of caution. ‘The more you stay in touch with a twin flame, the harder it gets to move forward and there is no way that you can ever end up together because of the cumulative negative energies that you introduce in each others lives.’ Now this was a cause of intense concern for me.

Growing up and out of relationships, I’ve always believed in the platonic, that no matter how rough things turn out, that there is always a way, a way forward, a way back into the arms of a lover. I’ve enjoyed distance as much as I have enjoyed love itself. To be able to hit the brakes and to let go of them when needed has always been my way of life! I’ve never believed in stability of love per se (love is meant to take whatever form of its choosing) as much as I have believed in the construct of it. Hence, this reading had now shook the foundation of my knowledge and my form of acceptable love.

My friend now went on to reveal another aspect of the psychic reading- ‘the soulmate’. My limited knowledge of the ‘doctrine of soulmates’ stemmed from the abstract Buddhist belief and teachings in which there is something called ‘The Law of an Even Deal’, which in brief says that ‘all giving and taking in a relationship must roughly amount to an even deal if both partners are to feel satisfied’. Though, unconsciously, women have allowed the law of an even deal to become uneven by being too submissive or too forgiving.

Expressing as clearly as she could mange, my friend went on to tell me that how the energy of the so-called soulmate is overbearingly overpowering the energy of a twin flame. How a soulmate enters your life not just a positive whiff of pure energy but also as a cleanser of negativity. And how your life no matter at what stage of crumbling-down gets a strong lift from the vibe of a soulmate!

As we discussed of our relevant circumstances of the past, we came to a similar conclusion- twin flame equals anger, soulmate equals sunshine.

As I began to set off on a journey of personal contemplation, I discovered two very pertinent themes in all human equations- anger & pain. As I weighed both on a precarious balance based on their consequent effects on human behaviour, I realized anger was a better tool to deal with relationship-failure than pain. Anger, boosted exponentially by human ego can last a lifetime, hence, making it better equipped, to ignore/ deal with, a twin flame. You can be angry at someone without looking back for answers of questions you are too afraid to find answers to, you can carry anger as your shield in any war entailing a familiar emotional fight.

But pain carries a different burden. Pain can hollow you out before you can even submit to the fact that you’re struggling!

John Stuart Mill, in his theory of Utilitarianism (Great Happiness Principle) defines happiness as ‘actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce pain’. Therefore, Mill defines the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable, as an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality.

Not to disparage the whole theory but to be able to struggle for pleasure without stumbling upon any amount of pain seems like a far-fetched desire to me. Pain as much a consequence of your own conscious decisions, is frequently more unwelcomed an outcome, especially in equations requiring a perfect balance of emotional bandwidths.

The life of pain is often longer than that of turbulent anger but anger is invariably supported by ego and self-control, hence, being within your own psychological jurisdiction and authority. Pain being a trickster can make you feel perfectly normal one day and completely livid on the other, where you wake-up in the middle of the night, clutching the sides of your stomach and wailing like a child who loses the sight of his mother at the time of his first feed.

What if your soulmate and your twin flame is the same person, capable of both destroying you and building you up at the same time, you ask? Well, then you’re screwed.

So, would I choose anger over pain to get over my twin flame or an irrational ex? Any day.

Am I capable of it, given my tenderness towards the platonic? No way.