Sole-mate

This poem explores self-love not as a replacement for relationship, but as a different foundation for it.

After spending so much time looking outward for love, belonging, and care, the poem turns inward to ask what it might mean to meet myself with the same devotion I had long hoped to share with another.

The desire for relationship remains.

What changes is the willingness to give myself the full measure of my own love and devotion first.

The title of this poem is deliberately a play on “soulmate.”

For much of my life, I carried a powerful longing to find someone with whom I could share myself completely. There was—and still is—something beautiful in that desire. I believe there are parts of ourselves we discover through relationship that we cannot access in quite the same way alone.

But I also began to recognize that there were forms of love, care, and attention I was neglecting to offer myself because I wanted to receive them from a partner.

This poem was an attempt to turn toward that longing rather than deny it.

The distinction in the second stanza is important to me:

“Not that I don't need another
Or want their company”

I wasn't trying to convince myself that I no longer needed intimacy, relationship, or other people. Nor was I just discovering that I had been whole all along. I already believed in my own wholeness.

What was changing was my understanding of how I needed to care for that wholeness.

I could still want tenderness from another person. I could want to be chosen, cared for, desired, witnessed, and loved. But wanting those things from someone else did not justify withholding them from myself while I waited.

That is why the poem repeatedly turns the language of relationship inward: meeting myself, giving love to myself, committing to myself, discovering my own unknown.

Some of its imagery becomes deliberately sacred:

“Lo' I must construct the church
Enshrine my pure virginity”

I wasn't using virginity here to mean sexual purity. I was reaching toward something more like inviolacy: a part of the self that belongs first to itself and does not need to be surrendered in order to be loved. If I had spent years treating romantic love as sacred, perhaps I could build a sanctuary for my relationship with myself too.

The water imagery extends that idea:

“I must no longer seek to fill
From wells not my own”

That doesn't mean never drinking from another's well. We nourish one another constantly, and I think relationship is one of the ways we encounter parts of ourselves we could never discover alone.

The shift is in refusing to leave my own well untended while waiting for someone else to offer me water. I cannot withhold from myself the forms of care that are mine to give simply because I wish someone else would give them to me.

I still want to receive love and care from partners. I still want forms of intimacy that cannot be replicated alone. But I want those things to meet the love I already practice toward myself rather than substitute for the love I have withheld.

The final stanza therefore feels less like a declaration of independence than a commitment:

“Abandoned not, nor alone
When I commit to me”

Other people can leave.

Relationships can change.

Love can be offered or withdrawn.

But whatever happens in relationship, I do not have to join anyone else in abandoning myself.

Perhaps becoming my own “sole-mate” means making myself the first participant in my own care: meeting myself with love, tending what I can tend, and remaining devoted to my own life while still staying open to everything that loving others may allow me to give, receive, and discover.