soulmate || namkook ||

🦋

A bond between souls is ancient – older than the planet.

It’s a blessing and a curse to have a soulmate. It’s...complicated to say the least. Some are willing to argue to the death that everything you endure on the journey to forever is worth it for the love of your soulmate, but others would argue that those people have just been brainwashed by the soul connection. The constant arguing is only exacerbated by the existence of the unmatched, those without a soulmate, because for every happy soulmate pair there is a happy unmatched couple and for every soulmate connection that ends in tragedy there's an unmatched person leading a life that's just as hard and unfulfilled.

The debates surrounding soulmates always seem to focus on whether soulmates are a gift or a punishment for those who have them. Those who are matched.

The soulmate process is something that every person in the world has to learn about whether in school or through word of mouth. It takes over a month to cover all of the intimate details of the soulbond, but it's generally enough to convince a person of whether or not they want to finish their soul connection.

When a person is born they get to live a nice, calm uncomplicated life until the ripe age of thirteen which is when the soul connection forms and suddenly their head is invaded and they can hear the thoughts of their soulmate (if they’re older) whether they want to or not. It’s a constant unfettered look into the life of their soulmate. As they get older they learn to tune out the noise and focus on other things, but the first few weeks are so distracting that students have to give notice to their teachers when the connection is established and no one blames them for not coming to school and if they did no one blamed them for being constantly distracted.

Hearing another voice in their head is only mildly terrifying given how much preparation they're given beforehand, but the experience is made completely terrifying when the voice in their head is in another language, as it often is. There have been many tales of soulmates who never got to meet because they both speak such obscure languages that they can’t learn to communicate with one another because neither can recognize the other's language. In most cases, though, soulmates are able to identify one another’s language and one or both will learn enough of the other’s language to start talking. The cutest “my soulmates speaks another language” stories always seemed to be those where the soulmates are able to teach one another their language, slowly growing closer as they start understanding each another.

Honestly, if the whole business of soulmates stopped right there with the biggest obstacle being that the person might not understand them then more people would probably be willing to argue about the value of soulmates, but it’s absolutely everything else in the process that has turned many people off to the idea of being with their ideal match.

After soulmates start talking in their heads the obvious next step would be to meet, right? Well once soulmates meet they start having dreams, or nightmares rather, in which they have to watch their soulmate’s final moments. As if having to see their soulmate die isn’t bad enough they then have to do it every night until they imprint on one another, which means that if someone meets their soulmate and gets separated from them before they imprint they both get to suffer through nightmares until they reconnect and fall in love. This also means that after being forced to watch their soulmate die (probably multiple times) they have to spend enough time with them to fall in love or else they’ll have to keep watching them die every night for the rest of their life.

But it doesn’t end there, oh no, of course not. After the soulmates have imprinted on one another and they’re supposed to be riding off into the sunset while kissing on the back of a white horse they get to the last and final stage of the soul connection: The burning. Once a soulmate couple is matched and imprinted their touch to one another becomes so hot it’s almost like putting their hand to an open flame. Even the slightest touch results in an explosion of pain that takes weeks to properly calm and heal. This seems to be the stage of the soul connection that really sparks the most debate. The first touch after imprinting is basically like putting your hand on a pan fresh from the oven, but every touch after that is only mildly painful and allows soulmates to relive the feeling of imprinting which is often described as the most euphoric feeling a person can ever experience. But is the pain worth the feeling of imprinting or "The Glow" as it's often called?