I’m sure that most of you have heard the word soulmate before. It’s usually used to wax poetically about how you knew that you were destined to be with someone when you first met. I would like to explain why I don’t call my husband my soulmate, and why I think that it’s a very hard word for normal people in normal relationships to aspire to.

First, let me put this out there. I love my husband very much. I figure I should say that off the hop before I go for coffee and hear the word on the street is that I’m getting a divorce. For the record, I’m not. He can’t get away from me that easily. Anyway, I love my husband for many different reasons. He was my high school sweetheart (with about one million break ups along the way), he’s the father of my son, and he’s the guy who took my virginity, time and youth lol. I appreciate him. I appreciate that I’ve gotten to have so many firsts with him that we can still laugh about. We have way too many inside jokes to even count at this point and I love it. At the end of the day we are friends and that makes a relationship a lot easier.

Why I refuse to call him the dreaded “soulmate” is because this shit is work. We aren’t perfect. It’s always been work. To me, soulmate eludes to having such a deep connection that nothing can touch you. Well fuck that. We have definitely broken before. Why? Because we are human. We have finally learned in our thirties that the key to make our relationship flow is constant communication. The sooner you put your grievance out there, the less yelling there will be. If you allow me to stew about something I will ignore you until I snap, turning into a raging she beast. This makes him shut down and then we don’t talk. That’s not very soul matey. We have to work at communication, we have to work at getting over disappointments, we have to work at not wanting to push the other down the stairs for leaving the milk out (that was sarcasm). Everyday we work at it because we want to, not because the universe is telling us to.

I feel as though when you start labeling your relationship, you start to pigeon hole yourself. Just like when you see those people making statuses about how happy and in love they are on Facebook. That’s setting yourself up for if a breakup ever happens. You guys, everyone and their dog will remember those statuses (and I can put money on the fact that some of your friends have even taken screenshots of them to send to their friends being snarky). I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be happy! I’m just warning you about wrapping your relationship that’s normal, with normal people problems, up with a big, romantic comedy bow.

Before you blow up my inbox with mean emails, I do believe in soul mates. However, I personally use that word to describe a lot of my friendships. Aka people I’m not having sex with. As soon as you start having sex with someone it changes the tides, or it should anyway. I choose to use “soulmate” to describe friendships that have always been there that are easy. We can go for months without speaking and have no reason to believe that the other person is mad. We have the same amount of love for each other, but are understanding to the fact that life gets busy. If my husband went to work away for the week and didn’t text me the first night, I would blow his fucking phone up. See, it’s work for him too. My marriage is not nearly as easy as my good friendships, and it shouldn’t be. Honestly, I save a lot of my worst moods and horrible acts just for him because he’s already seen me at my worst. There’s no surprising him anymore. For which I am thankful.

When you are married or in a relationship there are things that are going to happen. You are going to be hurt and you are going to hurt them. You are both going to say things that you can’t take back just because you are in the heat of the moment. Sometimes trust is lost and it has to be regained. Sometimes you genuinely don’t like each other. When you have kids sometimes you don’t have time for one another. That’s a relationship. It’s not always flowers and riding along beaches on horses and releasing doves with a kiss under the stars after. It’s real, and if you keep trying even though you’re tired or mad because you know that there are better times around the corner, then that to me means more than a title or word. You may even break up eventually. Not because you didn’t try and not because your love wasn’t great, but because things change and people change. Yes, even for soulmates.

I’m not trying to scare you or make you question your own relationship. I’m just warning you about going through a relationship without having both feet on the ground. No, I don’t call him my soulmate. I call him my husband, I call him a great father, and I call him my friend. Even if we have ups and downs, I know that he’s going to try to fix things right beside me until it’s just not in him to do so anymore. I understand that. Everyone has a point where they might not be able to go on. To call him my soulmate implies that we will be together forever. It would absolutely wreck me if something happened and didn’t work out between us and I had to say I let my “soulmate” slip away. When I call him my friend, he goes back to being the guy that I share all those inside jokes with. We become a normal couple with normal problems that have to keep working on their relationship, and that’s a-ok with the both of us.

xo Stephanie