I Choose To Choose You
Dear the One,
Just the other day, I told you I’ve resumed believing I have a soulmate.
Since then, I’ve been praying, asking God to lead me to her, to you.
Whenever I pray for big things like this, my answer always start in the thoughts that begin to repeat in my mind. As I’ve prayed, I’ve had a few thoughts recur.
Thought One
The first is a question I was asked by a man I worked for as a teen. We’ll call him Sam.
His first marriage had failed and he’d remarried.
Sam attended my church, but I’d never talked to him before working for him. He was a somewhat shrewd man, and perhaps even a little bitter. This was in part because his first wife, in an effort to get full custody of their two kids, had accused him of everything under the sun. He’d run himself into the ground working his business to afford over a hundred thousand in legal fees fighting her in court.
If I’m honest, I don’t think I ever liked him.
But that day Sam told me about a couple who had just gotten their own divorce. He told me how both of them had prayed, asking God to know if they should get married. They’d come to feel very strongly that they should, and that they were soulmates.
Then just three years in the divorce came.
They each became bitter and blamed God, feeling like He had lied to them.
“Why would God tell them to get married if they were going to get divorced?” Sam had asked me. I was only 17. I’m not sure why he thought I had an answer.
In my exuberance to defend God, I protested, saying that that was just one case. That there had to have been abuse or an affair.
He assured me that there had been no abuse and no affair. He said this was far from the only couple he knew to have felt like God wanted them to get married, only to get divorced. “Why would God do that?” Sam asked again. “If their marriage was just going to fail? Were they really meant for each other?”
The question haunted me.
Years went by and I found myself pondering Sam’s questions again. That day I was walking toward the temple in Rexburg, Idaho as I thought and finally found my answer.
With a blue sky overhead I thought, Could it be that these couples relied too heavily on their answers?
Were they shocked when the fights came, thinking, weren’t we supposed to be this perfect couple? God, didn’t you tell us we’re soulmates? How can we be fighting like this!
Or in other words, they failed to put the work in to build the wonderful relationship they wanted. Why? Because they assumed being soulmates meant it would be easy, that marital bliss would flow through their soul connection and out into their lives.
Thus, when that expectation wasn’t met, they gave up and blamed God; never realizing that it was the very expectation of ease that being “soulmates” gave them that destroyed them.
How ironic.
Even soulmates must put in the work.
Or so I mused that morning, as I walked to the temple.
Thought Two
There have been three times in my life that I’ve known with certainty that I was sitting across from someone I promised to find in the pre-mortal life.
One was a mission companion, and two were people I’d taught about Jesus Christ. In those two cases, I’d given each of them a priesthood blessing and felt to tell them that they’d asked me to find them in the pre-mortal life, specifically because I was someone who could connect to them. One was an excommunicated man who had hated every missionary before me, but for whatever reason liked me. And the other is a girl from high school who has come and gone from my life over and over as the years pass.
In each case, the knowledge of the pre-mortal connection didn’t just come. It came when God wanted it to.
Thought Three
As I’ve pondered these things, I also remembered a blessing my brother gave me years ago that changed the way I dated.
He blessed me to know that God would put people in my life so I wouldn’t have to be lonely while I waited to find my wife.
This came at a time when I treated every date like it was an interview for marriage. I quickly discounted wonderful women and didn’t give any chance to girls with whom I had a connection… because I had decided early that they weren’t the one. Why would I waste time with them if it just wasn’t ✨ right ✨?
After this blessing, I stopped dating that way. Instead I would say to myself “I don’t need to know if this girl is my wife. She might be, or she might be one of the people God placed in my life so I wouldn’t be lonely while I wait.” This mindset finally released me to just BE with women. No pressure to know. I stopped ditching women right away and instead spent significantly more time getting to know them.
As I made this change I began finding much deeper and richer connections. I discovered that I had been a fool to decide so quickly that a given girl wasn’t for me. I discovered that for most people, the richest parts of who they are are hidden behind time, effort, and many small, repeated moments of connection.
I know it seems like such a “duh” thing to say.
This should have been obvious to me from the start. But I had been blinded by my mad dash to find my wife, and had reduced far too many women to the superficialities presented in a first or second date.
I truly regret that. I’m also so grateful God helps us learn and grow.
Final Thoughts
All this led me back to the doctrine of agency and how deeply God honors this gift.
He will let us make mistakes and learn.
He will let us choose. Even if we choose poorly.
And because He will let us choose, it is my theory that He won’t tell me I’ve found my soulmate until after I choose her all on my own.
Otherwise, it would appear to my mortal perspective as though he were simply choosing for me.
For some, it might seem more romantic to have a spark, and moment of suddenly knowing as God says: she’s the one!
But tell me honestly. Which of these is more romantic?
- I see a girl, perhaps get to know her a little, and one day and God goes: “That’s her”
or
- Who she is and who I am pull at each other like gravity, so that in any life, or in any time, we’d eventually find each other. We’d choose each other even if we’d never heard of soulmates. Even if God did not tell us who we were choosing.
We’d choose each other not just because we made a promise to each other in the pre-mortal life, but because we were wise in who we made that promise to—knowing that even through the shadowy haze of the vale, we would recognize our choice.
Or at the very least, we are both seeing to follow God, in both the grand and simple ways, such that day by day, and little by little, He has been able to adjust our paths to cross. That He trusts us to see something good in one another and hold on.
I choose 2 choose you.
Either way, what is left to me is to seek to be in the right places at the right time, so God can help me honor my promise to find you.
And so despite now believing I have a soulmate, I won’t force myself to wait for a moment when I “know.” Instead, I’ll let the miracle of finding her—you—be in God’s hands, as I simply look for the right woman for a man like me.
Onward and Upward,
Aaron
P.S. Having said all that, God is still God. He will do what He will do. Just because I think He’ll wait to reveal my soulmate to me until after we’ve chosen/committed to each other of our own accord, doesn’t mean He will wait.
It’s mostly that wisdom says to me that I cannot demand nor expect Him to show me I’ve found her prematurely. So I won’t wait. I’ll exercise my free agency, and choose of my own accord.