What’re The Odds?
“There are 7.9 billion people on Earth and my soulmate is out there somewhere,”
That’s not true, or at least not the full story. I don’t subscribe to the “everyone has one single soulmate that they will live in monogamous bliss with for the rest of their life” idea (surprise)…but the rest of that sentence is bullshit too!
We are attracted to (and potentially fall in love with) the people around us. Or at the very least, we are more attracted to the people we have seen with our own eyes (either in person or on a screen) than people we have never seen before. In Psychology these are explained by Mere Exposure Effect, Proximity Effect, Similarity Effect, Elaboration Effect, and there are a few others.
Seems obvious, but it explains a lot that we take for granted. You married your high school sweetheart. You met your best friend because you sat next to one another in organic chemistry sophomore year. You dated somebody you met a friend’s birthday party. You have a “work husband” or “work wife.” You have excruciating, undeniable sexual tension with your local barista. There’s a redhead that goes to the gym at the same time as you and whenever you see her, your heart skips a beat despite not knowing her name…or anything else about her.
There are a lot of people in Atlanta that I will never, ever meet. There are people who live on my side of town who frequent the same stores or restaurants – we will never, ever cross paths. Not only will we never meet, and I will never see that person. Ever. I will die and be buried in the ground having never met a significant portion of Atlanta. (Dramatic, but true!)
According to my limited understanding of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of realities and timelines. There are realities where I’m not a companion. Maybe I’m a lawyer or consultant or elementary school teacher or a barista. Maybe there’s a reality where I have red hair and you see me at the gym every morning. Every morning you think of all the ways you could strike up a conversation with me. You finally get up the courage when…I just stop going. Maybe I moved? Maybe I started going to a different gym? You’ll never know. I’ll be the unnamed redhead that got away.
As luck would have it, we’re in the same place in the same timeline together. What’re the odds?
What if I decided to quit tomorrow? What if, just as you got up the courage to email me, I vanished. Website, email, social media…gone. I disappear forever into some unknown timeline. I don’t have any plans to quit, but who am I to laugh in the face of quantum mechanics.
There are an infinite number of odds, and we got the one that matters most. Why wait?