The Longing Behind Soul Connections: Love, Recognition, and Human Form
I believe my first observations when it came to love connection were from watching Disney movies, where the princesses always had handsome beaus rescuing them. As I got older, I watched Mary-Kate and Ashley going abroad somewhere and having summer flings and romances. Dawson’s Creek, where they honestly always had something happening amongst them. Or, to be frank, any TV show that’s been around. There were love-at-first-sight instances, complicated situation ships, meeting at a bar somewhere.
Just seeing the idea of love on TV made it seem like some easy, logical equation, where you just needed to plug in and remove the qualities you were looking for, and there—you created the perfect person. As I started moving a bit more through life, it went from trying to have that perfect equation and mimicking the folks on TV to soul mates and soul connections. With the way my thoughts rationalize things, I began to think, “Well, if life is about gaining the best and attaining the highest level of something, shouldn’t that be what we aim for?”
Just a bit before I started taking my work as an intuitive seriously, I dove into the world of soul mates, karmic relationships, and twin flames. A whole community of people (mainly women) waiting for their twin flame to leave their karmic, in deep distress because their counterpart was continuing to run away from the connection. Past-life connections explaining why the relationship is so hard in this lifetime. Everything and anything you can think of could be explained through past-life experiences and concepts.
Around the time I was fully ingrained in my work, I started encountering clients who would come to me with their love woes. As I began to understand the patterns from my own experiences and observations, I would explain the reality of what was actually going on with them and what they needed to learn. But the majority of them didn’t want to see themselves.
They just wanted reassurance that their strong feelings were requited—that there was meaning behind the intensity, and that there was a reward for all the hurt and pain they were going through with this person. And that reward, in their minds, would be the relationship.
As I started to sit with all of the things I was seeing and experiencing, I came to a sobering and eye-opening realization: in my eyes, the concept of love and connection was far more layered and complex than I had thought. The reality was that all any of us really want is to be seen.
The yearning I witnessed—both in people seeking through spirituality and those seeking through more conventional means—felt the same at its core. If I were to break it down in a more generalized gender sense, women, or feminine energy, tend to experience longing from a place of wanting a container or a vessel through which to experience themselves. Feminine energy tends to experience itself through relationship, not as a lack but as a mode of perception. The longing isn’t for the person as much as it is for the environment that allows self experience to become real. Feminine energy often seeks: space, resonance, permission to unfold. With masculine energy, or men, I’ve noticed that before knowing how to integrate on their own, they often seek people who reflect their ego identity, or someone who embodies the thing they’re trying to become in life. There’s a tendency to look for partners who affirm their sense of direction, status, or self-concept—someone who mirrors back the version of themselves they’re working toward, or who helps stabilize that identity while it’s still forming. The longing here isn’t so much for emotional containment, but for validation of trajectory. Love becomes a way to anchor purpose, to feel confirmed in who they are becoming, or who they believe they need to be in order to feel whole.
Beyond generalizations on gender. This energy can manifest differently. It’s not as simple as just man or woman. Because the reality is we as individuals are composed of both these energies so what we need will look different. Not everyone actually needs a relationship that reflects their internal work. Some people simply need someone who provides space, while others need the physical means through which they can explore themselves. For some, connection is less about partnership and more about having a stable environment where their inner world can be felt, expressed, or understood. The mistake happens when we assume every form of growth requires the same relational structure, or that intimacy must always take the shape of a committed relationship. Sometimes what’s being sought isn’t union, but permission— to experience oneself more fully through proximity, exchange, or presence, without the weight of defining what that connection is meant to become.
The reality is that love is not something that actually needs physical action. Love can stand on its own. You can love somebody and not be in their life. But as humans, we need some level of physical exchange to feel seen and noticed. That’s where the tension begins, because it raises the question of whether love needs function. Love, as an energetic reality, doesn’t require function, but love that is meant to be lived in human form does. Love doesn’t always need a relationship to exist, but relationships need function to be sustainable. And so the real question becomes whether that love can move through human structure—through time, bodies, needs, and presence—without dissolving into fantasy or longing. Love can stand on its own. Human life cannot.