Capital Letters

Primeval man "could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast …Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods ... Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: 'Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.'"

—Aristophanes, Plato’s Symposium

For a long, long time, I've been taken up with the idea of soulmates.  I've said before that I do believe in the phenomenon of love, but this is something more.  Aristophanes' (presumably drug-addled) speech above is often cited as the source of the modern conception of the soulmate, and it has interesting conclusions.  It is said that, because Zeus split us all in two, thus creating the genders, we will spend the rest of eternity searching for our (literal) other half.  This concept can be thought wonderful or terrible, should it be true.  We might be each destined to meet someone with whom we will find ourselves in the deepest love and sharing the deepest connection.  Or we might be cursed to search fruitlessly for this person, never satisfied with the person we find ourselves with.  But what I'm more concerned with is the existence of the concept itself.

I've often thought of this in a grammatical context: should I use capital letters or not?  Is this person The One or just the one?  "the one" is the person who you find, that is wonderful and loving and all those great things, and this in indisputable.  "the one" is the one you fall in love with, and there might not be any better feeling (except a nice MLT, where the mutton's nice and lean...).  But "The One" is that soulmate - the person who is all those same things that "the one" is, but also fulfills this sort-of mystical quality of being absolutely perfect for you.  This can lead into dangerous territory.

We are all humans, and none of us is perfect.  A believer in such a system of soulmates will never be satisfied, because their significant other is (uhh...probably) human!  I know it sounds like I'm trying to make a rational argument against a work that is basing its claims on a Greek (right?) god, but bear with me a little.

I can't say that soulmates don't exist, but I'm not a believer.  Why not?  Because I don't believe in the soul.  I also don't believe in predestination, "everything happens for a reason," or that anything is "meant to be."  And yes, for the record, when I get too into this line of thought, I get sad.  I wouldn't be human if I didn't.

I would absolutely love to find The One (and I wouldn't mind meeting Keanu Reeves [come on, you knew that joke was coming]), and I'd also love it if The One was a real concept.  But it's like the philosophical argument of existentialism: "Do I exist?"  If the answer to the question won't change your behavior, then the question isn't important.

Does "The One" exist?  I don't know.  It'd be great, sure, if everyone's One was attainable.  But I sure as hell know for a fact that "the one" exists, and I'm not going to wait to see if my One is living in a yurt in Turkmenistan.  I'm going to jump on the opportunity.