I’ve never believed in the idea of a soul mate. Even if they existed, the likelihood of anyone actually finding their counterpart on a planet filled with billions of people when they are only searching in the general vicinity they happen to already reside in, is probably slim to none. Just think about it. Your soul mate could be driving a rickshaw in suburban China or working in an antique shop in Bangladesh. They could be an Eskimo or an astronaut. A princess or a pauper. They could be anyone, from any walk of life. And yet millions of people believe that they’ve already found their sole mate in their small town high school. Give me a break. Unless you’ve met, interviewed, or somehow screened every person on the planet there’s no way you can be certain that you’ve found your soul mate.
What you have found is someone that you are extremely compatible with, someone who you are attracted to, who you get along with, who you click with. And that’s all well and good. Just know that you could, in theory, find a similar person to date in every town in the country.
Of course, we don’t think that way. When it comes to dating, specifically online dating, we lack perspective. We throw reason out the door, believing that when we come across a strong match, it’s some sort of divine intervention. We all want that fairytale ending. We all want to find “The One”. Yet none of us are really willing to do the heavy lifting. None of us is about to literally travel to the ends of the Earth to find that special someone. We all just passively leave our future happiness up to luck, happenstance, and nowadays, the machinations of computer algorithms. But what if there was a better way? What if there was a way to search every single person on the entire planet and find out who your potential matches were? Would you have five potential soul mates or five hundred? And would you want to know? Would you actually be willing to meet one of them or move to the other side of the world to be with them?
If you’re asking me the answer is yes. I would most definitely want to know all of my options and I would absolutely be willing to relocate for the right person. I came to this conclusion while traveling this past weekend to Seattle. While trying to kill some time I decided to swipe through my myriad of dating apps. Not to find someone to hook up with over the weekend, but rather just to see how I would do as a dater if I was living in Seattle. I did the same thing a few weeks back in Denver and London.
Regardless of what city I was in, I was blowing up. Multiple matches with really attractive, like-minded individuals, who love the great outdoors. A higher success rate than I usually get in my current hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona. Does that mean that I should pick up and move to the Pacific Northwest? Not necessarily. It’s nice just knowing what’s out there. But, if I want to date that hot software engineer from Google (an actual match) or that cute transplant from Washington, D.C. (another actual match that I had a great conversation with) then I probably should.
And that’s kind of the point. If you’re not having success where you’re currently living (Arizona) and you could be dating a hot software engineer from Google (in Seattle), wouldn’t you want to know that information so that you could act on it? Otherwise you might wind up single the rest of your life or wind up settling for someone that you’re not that into because you wrongly assume (based on incomplete information) that said person was your best option, when clearly they weren’t.
These are important, life-altering decisions, after all, and we’re what, leaving them up to chance? Leaving them up to fate to intervene while we’re shopping for produce in the supermarket? We swipe day and night on apps, let our friends set us up on blind dates, pay matchmakers, do it all, and yet, we never do the one thing that could solve all of our problems; we never expand our horizons and look over the actual horizon.
So, here’s what I’m proposing: let’s create a worldwide database of single people. Sortable by various personality traits, physical characteristics, and interests. The one thing this database won’t have: a way to search by location. The objective isn’t to find someone in your area to hook up with. The objective is to find someone, in any area, that you could potentially be with. After all, if there’s another licorice-eating, Rick and Morty watching, abstract face-finding, nature-loving, uber nerd out there wouldn’t you want to know about it? I know I would. Regardless of where they may be located.

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