by Kate Flaxx

Created on: June 10, 2010

The Oxford Dictionary defines the term soul mate as ‘a person who is ideally suited to another’

‘A soul mate is like the echo of oneself working at the same task to fulfil a service to God’ - http://users.spin.net.au/~tsl/flames.htm

According to Greek Mythology, Aristophanes, a comic playwright of ancient Athens presented a story about soul mates at Plato's symposium.  Plato was a classical Greek philosopher and a symposium is a drinking party.

This story said that humans originally had four arms, four legs and one head with two faces.  It says that Zeus, the king of the gods, split them in two because he feared their power and this condemned them to search for their other half for the rest of their lives.

Even though these myths and ideas, in a romantic view of the world, are a lovely concept and we would like to fantasise that they are real, they lead us to one question; in a world where the population exceeds 6 billion people, is it really possible to find that person we are destined to be with?

It’s true that we meet people through our lives that we have an attraction to, we can fall in love with them and then spend as little as a week with them or as long as decades.   We can have the same ideas or the same dislikes and likes and so many more things in common.

Do the people who are married or have been together for years call themselves soul mates?  The chances are they don’t because a long marriage or relationship requires working at that relationship in many different ways on many different levels.  They can’t mutually have a thought that they are meant to be together, leave it at that and continue with their lives.

If certain people were meant to be, we'd be living in an almost perfect world.  Fate would have to bring the people who are destined to be together at some point in their lives, everyone would live happily ever after and relationships would be simple, but we all know they're not.

In the course of my research for this debate, I found that the term ‘soul mate’ was exploited to a certain degree for the benefit of religious purposes and astrology.  I am not in any way insulting astrologers or their methods of work, nor am I insulting anyone's religious beliefs. I'm a person who checks my horoscope in the weekly paper every now and then but I don’t live my life by it.

Just as an example, if I were to go to an astrologer and ask ‘when will

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