As two souls grow together, they strive for the ideal of being soul mates. Soul mates are made, not born. Your soul mate is not determinate, except perhaps in retrospect. There may be many potential soul mates for you in the world. The one with whom you choose to invest your time and love will become "the" soul mate for you.

The classical one, true soul mate seems to imply destiny, and discounts virtue in favor of luck. It propagates a view that the universe owes me love, rather than an "economy" where you reap what you sow, where the quality of love you find is comparable to that of the love you give.

Not everyone is a viable soul mate; if you're sufficiently nit-picky, no one is a viable soul mate! Relationships fall apart when one or both participants are unwilling or unable to maintain the relationship to their mutual satisfaction. If souls grow, we hope they grow together, but sometimes they grow apart.