The Taco Traveler

Prologue: This is my worst piece of non-fiction, I think (my fiction is crazy-stupid-bad). But I was under a pretty strict time constraint. Anyway, the couple is still together, so there's that. In fact, I'm proud to say that every marriage I've ever written an essay for is still intact. Both of them. Can Shakespeare say that? Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Anonymous? The Corinthians? Baaaah!

Would you like to use this essay in your own wedding (or a wedding where you're reading)? You may use this (edit the names, duh) but please credit tacotraveler.com in the program. However, if you're a single guy hoping to get lucky at the wedding by appearing sensitive and literate, you can say you wrote it yourself. But you may have better luck with my other wedding essay, which I think is better and proved a bit luckier for me. Good luck, dude.

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Soul Mates

For Scott & Robin - September 21, 1996

What I'm about to say may be one of those things that seems like a revelation to me, but is something everyone else already knew, like the time I called a friend late at night to say: "You know the refrigerator brand, Frigidaire? I get it: frigid air." But the concept of a soul-mate has somehow eluded me. . . in more than just the tricky grammatical sense. Here's the Frigidaire part: Scott and I have lived together; we shared a house; we were house-mates.

But I'd never thought about the term "soul-mate" very deeply until Scott & Robin tasked me with writing something for their wedding. I'd always just thought: "Soul-mate, someone you're destined to be with forever," as if these two separate souls are drawn together by some cosmic force, and as if that "coming together" completes the soul-mating. But that's just how the term is used on Oprah. That's the generic interpretation. It takes two people like Scott and Robin, making the commitment they're making today, to remind us of the grammatical roots of the term: "Soul-mates:" they share one soul. Combine those grammatical roots with the significance of their wedding bands: They each provide a one-hundred and eighty degree arc, a half of the circle that makes their love complete and whole. "Soul-partners"

I can't answer the broad questions like: "Who gets to use the soul if Scott goes fishing but Robin's going to see a foreign film?" or "Why is it that while talking with one soul, Audrey Hepburn, on the Ouija board, I didn't sense a bit of her soul-mate there?" But maybe I have an idea or two: To carry the house-mate analogy a little further - when Scott and I shared that house in Kirkland, we still had other interests, worked different jobs, cooked separate meals. . . . And when I visited friends in California and Scott went to North Carolina to see family, we still paid rent on that shelter we knew we'd eventually come back to.

Is the simple answer then, that soul-mates share that soul only during the time they're together; and together, here, on this earth? Maybe. Regardless, I still believe we all either have known, know, or will know that person, someday, whom we can call "soul-mate." Let's just hope we're all as lucky as Scott and Robin, standing here in front of us after having found their soul-mate early in life, about to make official a promise they and many of us already knew: that they'll be house-mates, soul-mates, and partners for the rest of their lives - possibly longer.