The South Node is transiting my ascendant. When this transit occurs, one of the things that happens is that people from your past or whom you already know seek you out, and they can often be of great help, since this transit can be a struggle to move forward and not rely on old habits and ways of being.

You may also meet people from your past whom you haven’t actually met yet.

I think I met another soul mate recently. Wonder and awkward, as these things are. Actually, as a working astrologer, I notice that clients who come to me out of the blue have some sort of karmic connection to me, whether we knew each other in a past life, or were fated to become acquainted in this one. If someone asks me if they will ever meet their soul mate, I refrain from saying that they just did, though I know that this isn’t what they mean.

Well, you could do worse.

So, chances are, if you are here, and if you want astrology services, we are soul mates.

The problem with soul mates, fundamentally, is that they’re still people, and so are you. And you won’t get to fuck every soul mate you have. That is physically impossible — because there is no time, and even still, there are some you simply don’t want to be intimate with like that, like with say, siblings. You may not even want to be around soul mates because finished business should be left finished.

The problem with soul mates, for many, is that we tend to confuse meeting our soul mates with romance, because the feelings are similar enough, and we may be scared to meet soul mates because we don’t want to create a romantic connection. Thus, we think of people we are karmically connected to as romantic partners from the distant past. Many rely on a worn out idea that a soul mate is a dream lover whom we incarnate to find over and over again, fall in love with in a blaze of glory until we die and do the same damned thing again, because we always think that attraction must mean sexual attraction, or that all attraction ultimately express itself or culminate in sexual attraction.

Get over it. Hollywood lied to you.

Here are eight reasons why you should get over meeting and finding your soul mates:

Chances are that your past lives weren’t filled with romance and wonder. You know how I know this? Because this life isn’t filled with romance and wonder now, and we tend to repeat our ingrained behaviors. It is entirely possible that you lived many lives in which there was little in the way of romance, because the idea of falling in love and being with the person who gets your loins quivering is a fairly recent idea, especially if you’re a woman.

You have hundreds, if not thousands, of soul mates. Travel and migration means that you may have soul mates in many parts of the world and not realize it. You may be loosely connected to large groups of people, especially if a generational planet (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) in the charts of those alive today contacts a karmic point, like the nodes or Vertex, in your chart. You could have had a great impact on a lot of people you don’t even really know, and they may feel that connection more strongly than you will, especially if you were like some warlord asshole who wiped out entire villages.

Your connection may not have been ideal. Checking the nodal connections between my chart and my ex-husband’s, there was a lot of reason for us to find each other and come together, and unfortunately, we let the relationship go on way too long, too long after we finished learning what we needed to know. And I think we had done this before, like an arranged marriage or a shotgun wedding. Just because you are connected doesn’t mean that it was awesome and you need to find it again, replaying the same song over and over again. Sure, there is comfort in the familiar, but there is also such a thing as a karmic rut.

And keep in mind that if you were ever murdered in the past, you may be karmically connected to your murderer, and meeting them again may not bring you the warm fuzzies.

You are alive to form new connections, and not just to people. Life is for living, not gathering and preserving. Everything is impermanent. Except for saltines. They stick around forever, in the back of the cupboard.

I believe that people generally incarnate into what is familiar. I don’t think that souls suddenly become wise when discarnate, figuring out what they need to learn, and then lose it again when they enter a body. That is kind of dumb, isn’t? Why can’t people learn the easy way? After all, I don’t need to become a meth addict to know that the lifestyle of a meth addict is not for me. I already know this.

But we are affected by the world, and we affect it. We grow and change, and we need people. If we move away from one village to another but then never leave it, we develop connections to those new people that may be stronger than those we left. I spent my entire childhood in a small city, but when I returned as an adult, I didn’t know how to get around, what to do for fun, or how to network to get a job, even though I spent my childhood there. I only knew how to do those things in other places.

You are alive to live your life and figure stuff out and explore what planet Earth has to offer, not to fill a cosmic Rolodex.

Life is also for loss and change. You will probably not meet your soul mates at birth, at least not all of them. They will break your heart when they tell you they already have a boyfriend or girlfriend. Soul mates die. They sever connections. They repeat past ugly behaviors and make you cry. You show up at the wrong time and miss them by a hair. They may show up at the right time and you, for whatever your reasons are, let them go and regret it for the rest of your days. That’s being alive. No one truly lives with no regrets unless they’re incapable of retrospection.

Or perhaps you do terrible things to and by your soul mates, like cheat on your spouse. It is not uncommon for someone to cheat on a soul mate with a soul mate, even if they insist it meant nothing and it was just sex. It is not uncommon to meet a soul mate who turns out to be a bona fide narcissist who doesn’t really care about you or simply cannot honor or respect your feelings. It is not uncommon for a soul mate to keep chasing you down relentlessly even when you know you don’t want to be with them.

Astrologically speaking, there is probably little chance you will meet your ideal in the conventional sense. First, you are not ideal. You have flaws, problems, setbacks, and quirks. Second, everyone else is like that, too. Third, the chances that you will 1) not only meet someone with whom you will have the most harmonious synastry but 2) you both don’t end up manifesting the ugly sides of your astrological makeup AND the inter-aspects between the charts is rare to unlikely. Life is fighting nature, and being a social animal is a constant negotiation.

It also seems to me that people who want an ideal relationship want something boring, always on an even keel, something that doesn’t make one actually feel alive. We need conflict, discomfort, and pain to grow, change, and heal. Sometimes the pain is unbearable, unavoidable.

But this is not to say that one should give up and accept what is already around.

Now, I don’t necessarily think that souls actually choose to have crappy lives. I think it is flippant and shallow to think that a child born into an abusive family choose it because he or she was probably an abuser in a past life and needs to learn what it feels like, or that an abused spouse was once the abusive spouse in a previous life. As we can see quite plainly, violence is cyclic in any closed system, whether it be a family, culture, or country, and no one needs to learn that being punched and kicked hurts. I do think that we tend to incarnate into the same cycles, though, but not with the intent of simply being on the other end. People also tend to incarnate back into these same systems.

But to say that is justification for the crappy experience creates some sort of cosmic excuse for violence. And to champion feelings of connectedness to those people over safety and finding love outside of the system is myopic and shallow. We are not cogs in a machine.

You are born complete, you know. You just have to put all the pieces together. This takes time. Your soul mates are also born complete, and they can live without you, just as you can live without them. And when you need to jam, you can find other soul mates in the world.

Astrotwins aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, anyway.  I once met an astrotwin. We were born on the same day, albeit 21 years apart, with the Sun in Sagittarius in the 9th house, and the Ascendant at the exact same degree in Pisces. And you know what happened?

We wandered away from each other, because that is what 9th house Suns in Sagittarius with Pisces rising do.

Will we ever meet again? Eh. Maybe. I don’t know. He was certainly living the kind of life I would have considered close to ideal at the time, for myself. But, at the time, I was drawn to someone much different, a soul mate, and I went with him, and he is currently driving me nuts, but I’m here. He is, astrologically, a soul mate, but he doesn’t see it that way. He has slowly developed some semblance of spirituality that is all his since meeting me — which is his karmic task, with his North Node in 2nd house Pisces, very late in the sign, conjunct my Aries Moon — but the woo is all mine.

You think that’s weird? Hell, I’m the one who lives in my skin all the time.

There is no point in hooking up for life with someone who is just like you. Sure, it may seem nice, and it may even feel good, but it doesn’t nourish. It’s cotton candy. It’s dippin’ dots for dinner. First, we look for people who are just like us on the surface: how we see ourselves through the eyes of the world. Age, sex, location. Career, religion, place of origin, socioeconomic class. Favorite food. Favorite music. Favorite sports. This is part of our image, the crap we put on dating site profiles. Sure, we may have fun. We may not feel lonely. We may feel justified in being what we are on the surface because someone else enjoys it. But is that really what we need, and is it love? And does it help us become more loving to other people by seeking out a mirror?

Why yes, my favorite romantic comedy  IS Harold and Maude.

There is more room in a broken heart. Carly Simon was right. We may feel this is completely untrue, but we need to have our hearts broken. But I don’t think that heartbreak is an apt description of what happens to one psychically when they are emotionally hurt or denied what they desire. It doesn’t break, shatter, or fall apart. It’s more like a freefall, and the feeling we dread is the sudden G-force of the fall. The ground that was our foundation is gone. Even if it is unrequited love and always was, we attached and rooted into that nonetheless. We felt alive, and we meant something.

That is why falling in love is also a misnomer. It is not a fall, but a lifting up. Yanked up into love. Floating into love. Flying face-first into love.

The breaking of the heart is how we learn a few things, if we’re lucky. We know that we are always falling anyway, but there is simply no landing. We learn that we can be okay on our own, if we’re lucky to learn that, and we know that we are more than the reflection and approval of others. We also learn that we can heal.

One of the things I’m most hesitant to tell a client is that they will meet someone and fall in love. Not meet someone, not fall in love. Individual questions are easier. It is also easier when the wiser client uses the word might.

We have so many opportunities to meet special people. We have opportunities to fall in love. But I can’t guarantee that someone will fly up into love, or float into it, or fling themselves with wanton abandon toward love (which I think is the most apt description of the flight of infatuation). But a lot of people ask me about this because they’re afraid of being hurt, because they want to find someone who won’t hurt them. A lot of them ask because they want to find someone for whom they don’t have to rearrange their lives or shift their thinking. After all, when the person goes, then what are you, but a version of yourself that you think you became because of the relationship? If you have become phony for the sake of the relationship, then I suppose the fear is real, but most of the time, people mistake growth for lack of authenticity.

But then we learn, if we are lucky, that there is more room in our hearts, that they are still in tact, that still beat in our chest.

We think that a soul mate is the person we don’t have to shift for because they’re our mirror image. Soul mates are exactly the people who make us shift. They nudge us in the direction we are supposed to go in, the one we want to go in, despite our resistance. Even when they depart and send us into an emotional free fall. How long we fall is up to us. And take all the time you need to get used to the orbit around Maya, the Earth/the Illusion of the life you thought you had and would have.