“Is Love Divine?”
When reading Kate Chopin’s Private Papers edited by Emily Toth and Per Seyersted, I was particularly drawn to a section that showed responses to the question “Is Love Divine?” by well-known women (219-220). Of the women who answered, Kate Chopin was one. Her response to the proposed question was as follows:
It is as difficult to distinguish between the divine love and the natural, animal life, as it is to explain just why we love at all. In a discussion of this character between two women in my new novel I have made my heroine say: “Why is it I love this man? Is it because his hair is brown, growing high on his temples; because his his eyes droop a bit at the corners, or because his nose is just so much out of drawing?”
One really never knows the exact, definite thing which excites love for any one person, and one can never truly know whether this love is a result of circumstances or whether it is predestination. I am inclined to think that love springs from animal instinct, and therefore is, in a measure, divine. One can never resolve to love this man, this woman or child, and then carry out the resolution unless one feels irresistibly drawn by an indefinable current of magnetism. This subject allows an immense field for discussion and profound thought, and one could scarcely voice a definite opinion in a ten minutes talk. But I am sure we all feel that love - true, pure love, is an uncontrollable emotion that allows of no analyzation and no vivisection.
I have always been a hopeless romantic, and for better or for worse, have always believed in soul mates. I don’t necessarily believe one is “destine” to end up with and live happily ever after with a soul mate. It very well could happen, while it very well may not. I think your soul mate is someone who is put in your life to make you feel incredibly alive - someone you love completely and passionately. Someone that encourages you to be the absolute best you that you can be. I especially like how Chopin refers to love as being an “uncontrollable emotion that allows of no analyzation and no vivisection” because it is such an indescribable feeling that everyone does feel, in one way or another.