Robyn’s Blog

This is actually a post in response to Dr. C’s comment on my previous post about belonging to someone and “intense, romantic love.”  But that’s not really what I mean when I talk about belonging to someone, and I’m not sure if that’s what Robert Nathan means either.  I think that intense, romantic love can sometimes go hand in hand with belonging to someone.  You can maybe be romantically involved with a soul mate, but you don’t have to be.  I think you can be soul mates without it being romantic at all.  Actually, I think this is a real problem–because when you realize that someone is your soul mate, how do we know how to deal with that knowledge except to try and be with them romantically?  If you know you belong with someone you want to completely belong to them.  But that can’t always work.   In Portrait of Jennie, Eben eventually is able to be romantically involved with Jennie, because she is moving at a different time as him, and is able to grow up quickly enough to find him and be with him (however shortly).  But when she was a little girl, and Eben was an adult, they still knew that they belonged together.  It was just that when they were with one another, they knew that that was where they were supposed to be.  That’s why this is so troubling–it’s because it’s not the romantic love that is important, really.  Hopefully that works out too, but the concept that I think this book shows so beautifully and hauntingly is that two souls can simply be a part of one another, with no other explanation except that they are, regardless of circumstance.