She didn’t believe in soulmates, not really, not in the way the word got used in films. She believed in compatibility, timing, deliberate effort. She’d said as much to Costas early on, half-expecting him to argue, to make a case for fate or destiny or whatever romantic framework most people seemed to want.
He hadn’t argued.
“I don’t think it’s magic either,” he’d said. “I think we just happened to meet at a time when we were both capable of choosing each other properly. That’s not less special. It’s just less convenient as a story.”
She’d thought about that conversation often over the following years — through a difficult stretch when his mother was ill, through her own crisis of confidence at work, through ordinary stretches where nothing dramatic happened at all. Every time, she came back to his framing: not fate, just two people who kept choosing, deliberately, again and again, even when the choosing required effort.
It had freed her, somehow, from the anxious watching she’d done in earlier relationships — the constant checking for signs, for proof that this was *meant to be*. There was no meant to be. There was just the daily practice of two competent adults deciding, repeatedly, that this was worth the work.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Costas said now, watching her face from across the kitchen.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you’re thinking about whether this is real.”
She laughed, caught out. “It’s not about whether it’s real. I know it’s real. I’m thinking about how unglamorous it is. How much of this is just — deciding. Over and over.”
“That’s the part I like best,” he said. “The deciding. Anyone can fall into something. Deciding takes both of us, on purpose, every day.”
She crossed the kitchen and kissed him, unglamorously, completely on purpose.
✦ Today’s Reflection
Do you think of your love as something that happened to you, or something you actively choose? Does the distinction change how you experience it?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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