(CW: aphobia / aro and ace issues)

I’ve never quite fully understood the concept of a soulmate.  That we are all halves of a person until we meet another, who is meant to complete us, is downright absurd.  I’ve never once felt like I was missing a piece, like I needed anyone else to make me whole.  Besides, once a soulmate is discovered, what are you supposed to do with them?  Hold hands while trying to watch the sunset in a cloudy park, buy each other wilting red roses waiting to die, and, God forbid, kiss each other in the middle of a thunderstorm?  The thought does nothing but flood my brain with a sickening sort of dread.  

So why, pray tell, does everyone around me want one so badly?  And why can’t they understand why I don’t?  They speak of it with this reverent tone, as if it’s the utmost part of the human experience.  But what’s the point of finding someone who makes you fall head over heels when you don’t even know what that feels like?

They say when you look into the eyes of your soulmate, it feels like looking into the eyes of an old friend, someone you’ve met a hundred times before in a hundred different lifetimes, and that’s how you know when you’ve met them.  Which is why I make a point to keep my eyes cast down as much as possible. 

My therapist is trying, very much in vain, to help me work through these soulmate issues.  

“What I don’t understand is _why_ you’re so scared of having a soulmate,” she likes to tell me.  “It’s a beautiful thing, you know.  To be in love.”  And I’ll try to explain that it isn’t fear, exactly, but revulsion.  Like the butterflies I’m supposed to be feeling in my stomach were replaced with a thousand squirming hagfish.  And I want to gag, and cry, and scream. 

She’s attempting to help me work up to making basic eye contact.  She—and practically all of my friends and family—say it’s necessary when it comes to making interpersonal connections, and I have to get myself to be able to do it at some point or other. They’re all wasting their time.  I’ll never look into another person’s eyes for as long as I live, no matter what anyone tells me.  I’d rather keep staring at shoes and hiding behind my overgrown bangs than risk finding out whether someone is my soulmate or not.  

I sound messed up, I know.  What kind of person doesn’t want to find everlasting love?  Even my therapist thinks there’s something wrong with me, I suspect.  But I simply don’t want to have to spend my life making promises of love I don’t think I can fulfill.  I don’t want to write sappy letters and Valentine’s Day cards and pretend I mean those words when I don’t.

I refuse to have a soulmate.  And I refuse to fall in love, because if I did, it wouldn’t at all be true.