At the beginning of the year, I wrote about leaving a relationship. And last week, I released my ex’s response to that piece. Both of those add context to today’s post.
I’m overwhelmed in the best possible way by how much his response has touched people; it has been such a joy reading all of the comments. I’ll write more about that in the future, but for now - my deep gratitude to everyone who read and interacted with that piece, it means the world.
When I was younger, it was never a question of if my soulmate would come, only when. I had always assumed the arrival of my life partner to be my birthright. But now, single at 40, that conviction had been wavering for years, quietly coming apart at the seams. And here I was reading written confirmation that I had in fact been mistaken:
“You are not here to center your life around making a family of your own. Rather, you are here to find Friendship, the highest expression of human relationship.” read my Soul Code.
The eight page description of what I was here on Earth to do in this lifetime had been gifted to me by someone I love dearly and trust implicitly; a present to be opened on a trip to Ibiza as I crossed this milestone threshold into my forties. And within the pages of the Soul Code, my worst fear, neatly packaged into two little sentences. Reading that pronouncement as even a possible truth plunged me into a hole so deep, I couldn’t see which way was up.
Now, you might say, this is insane, these are just words on a paper. Fuck this Soul Code reading! And yes of course—maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. Maybe there’s a whole spectrum of ways in which it is true. Maybe I will have partnership but it won’t be the central focus of my life. Maybe I will have a family in an untraditional way. Maybe the great love I’m seeking in this lifetime will be found in my friendships. BUT the degree to which reading that paragraph wrecked me, showed me how badly I really do want this great love to be all consuming. Even the idea that I would have partnership—but it wouldn’t be the center of my life—brought out the wild desperation of a terminal diagnosis.
It landed so hard because it was already partly true. In forty years, this person hadn’t arrived. What made me think they’d be coming in the next forty?
So I tried on what it would feel like to live the Soul Code pronouncement as an unequivocal truth:
Would I date more loosely?
Would I have sex more freely?
Would I be lonely?
Could my friendships nourish me enough to make up for the lack of partnership?
What would be the central focus of my life?
Would people pity me?
Would I pity myself?
Would life be worth living if soul partnership wasn’t coming?
Would it torture me, this thing that stayed beyond my reach?
Would I be set free from the tyranny of the search?
On the flipside—what if partnership was an unequivocal reality?
Would I finally feel chosen?
Would it be everything I’ve been waiting for?
Would we grow and evolve in parallel ways?
Could this relationship carry the weight of my expectations of great love?
Would I be the best version of myself with him?
What if he shrunk my life?
What if he changed in ways I never could’ve expected?
Could I maintain my desire for him for decades?
Apart from our partnership, is he a good man in the world?
Would he love me enough to fill the void of losing my dad?
After my last breakup, there was a period of time when my ex and I were in contact too much for two people trying to move on. I knew I couldn’t be truly open to meeting someone else if we were talking this much but we were addicted to the comfort the other provided. After many, many, many conversations on the topic, in which we never seemed to arrive anywhere, I texted him, “I need you to fully claim me or leave me alone. I can’t do the in-between.” He responded nine days later, affirming neither option.
He wouldn’t or couldn’t claim me.
His ambivalence and the Soul Code meshed in my brain and played on a loop in my head: “No one is going to claim you.”
I was asking another person to fully claim me but could I claim myself and my own desire for partnership?
With everything else in my life—I have gone after it, conquered it, claimed it. Partnership was the one area where I was expecting it to arrive, expecting it to happen to me.
There’s a particular section from The Atlantic’s The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance that lives in my brain. They note that when you survey both men and women about partnership, there hasn’t been a shift in desire for a partner over the last few decades—only in outcome. The pervasive sentiment recently is: “Ideally, this would not be my life, but finding a partner is just too difficult.”
When work is hard, most of us don’t just stop working. We don’t seem to give up on the concept of friendship. We seemingly never stop trying to biohack our way to immortality or optimizing every minute for maximum productivity. We know how to be relentless in the pursuit of something, so what is so uniquely painful about the unrequited desire for partnership that we’d rather put it down than claim it?
If anyone had asked me in the last 25 years if I wanted a partner, I would’ve answered in the affirmative; I never denied it. But as the years crept on, and the soul partnership I was seeking evaded me, as other relationships came and went, doubt about my birthright crept in. I quietly ignored the underlying fear—thinking maybe if I don’t look directly at it, partnership will come “when I least expect it.”
Has the Soul Code shown me something about our collective psyche—that to look directly at the pain of possibly not having partnership in this lifetime, is too devastating, too painful to face, that partnership is too fundamental to the human experience? To face never having it is to stare directly into the sun of the loss, obliterating any illusions in the process. If we carry on building every other aspect of a full life, we can just look at the fear peripherally, vaguely hoping that we’ll be struck by a stray partnership arrow, if we’re lucky.
Seeing my worst fear written in the Soul Code clarifies for me that I’m not going to relinquish the desire.
I refuse to put it down.
But what does it mean to truly claim it?
In Case You Missed It
I answered a reader submitted question about setting a boundary with situationships.
Why Ibiza is the geographic representation of vitality, eroticism, life force energy.
I’m scared I won’t find a partner or have a child, with my healer Jen Gnisci.
A step by step exercise to finding your purpose, what energizes you, qualities to look for in a partner and qualities to cultivate in yourself for partnership
If you have questions or topics you want to submit anonymously, you can do that here.
You can also DM me or leave a comment on the Substack app; I’d love to hear what’s on your mind!
Stunning, Sara! My favorite piece yet! Claim it! xox
Can you speak more to this “soul code” and how/where you went to get this? I’d love to hear more about this as I am interested in mine. I’m older and have a good idea at this point lol… but it would still be something I’d like to pursue. Thank you! Love your writing; kudos to you for being strong enough to leave a relationship when your partner wasn’t able to give you what you need.