I Met the One.Until I Didn’t.

By Prerna Chandra · Tue May 12 2026

Love & Becoming

I always waited for my prince charming to arrive. The one, destined, once-in-a-lifetime kind of love that I was absolutely certain was written somewhere in the universe with my name on it. And can you blame me, really? I grew up on Cinderella and Snow White, on the particular magic of stories where love is the reward at the end of all the waiting, and I watched every rom-com I could find with devotion most people reserve for religion. The slow motion shot of eyes meeting across a room, the world tilting just slightly on its axis, everything clicking into place with the satisfying finality of a lock finding its key. One person. One great love. One forever. The belief was so deeply ingrained in me that questioning it never even occurred to me, the way you do not question the ground beneath your feet until the moment it shifts. Society sells this story beautifully, in fairy tales and songs and in the way people speak about love as though it is a destination you arrive at once and never have to leave, and I had bought it completely, gratefully. 

But tender, complicated, occasionally brutal life  had other plans for me. 

The first one was nothing like I had imagined. Nothing about him fit the picture I had assembled across years of stories and longing, and yet the moment I was near him, something in me simply knew in that way that cannot be argued with or explained away. It was not about how he looked. It was the depth between us, the intensity that arrived without any need for justification, as though it had always been there and we had simply found our way back to it. There was a protectiveness in how he held space for me and a love so full and unhurried that it did not require a future to give it meaning. Somewhere underneath all of it, we both understood that this was not built to last in the conventional sense, and yet it was enough, all of it, meeting him and loving him and being changed by him, every part of it was enough to count as a forever.

The departure shattered me like real things can. The grief was not simply missing him. It was the loss of a version of myself I had only just begun to meet.

A year later, I met someone in all innocence, with no particular expectation. The very first thing I noticed were his eyes, brown, hazelnut, with sunlight falling through them in a way that made time do something strange for just a blink of a moment, and I was completely lost inside them, as if they were speaking directly to something in me that had been waiting to be addressed. I did not understand the weight of that moment then and brushed it.

We became friends first, and then more than friends, and what unfolded between us was unlike anything I had words for at the time. He felt like home. In all the chaos I was quietly carrying, in all the noise that life had accumulated around me, being near him was the first time in a long time that I could simply exhale. He had a way of making stillness feel safe, of being present without demanding anything from that presence. And somewhere in that stillness, he healed parts of me I had not even acknowledged were still wounded. He showed me, in the most unhurried and unassuming way, what it actually felt like to be loved without conditions attached to it. He awakened something in me that I had given up expecting anyone to find, and then, as these things go, we parted. I was heartbroken. Yet I carried the transformation he had left behind even as I struggled to find my footing again, and in my survival instinct, in the way the body insists on continuing, I moved forward into the life that was still waiting for me.

Then came the third, and this time I was so certain. We were mirrors of each other in ways that felt almost unsettling, carrying the same wiring, the same sensibilities, the same contradictions arranged in the same order. He had to be the one, I thought, and I thought it with a conviction that felt different from all the hoping I had done before, more grounded somehow, more recognisable to itself. We could not be together in any conventional sense, and I understood that clearly, and it did not matter, because what mattered was the pull between us, completely illogical, resistant to every sensible argument my mind raised against it. I listened to my heart and went toward him anyway, against every usual norm, and I felt in those months as though I existed, in some essential way, to help and support him, to be present for him in whatever way he needed, and that this felt like purpose enough.

Separating from him did not just bring his pain forward. It cracked something open, and suddenly I was not grieving only him but all three of them at once, all the love and loss and transformation and leaving compressed into a single eruption that had apparently been waiting for exactly this moment to finally have permission. It was heavy and is difficult to describe without sounding dramatic, but it was also the very thing that broke the fantasy of the one soulmate, gently and permanently. 

“You would ask me how I knew, out of everyone, that these three were my soulmates. I would tell you: the glint. The spark. It is unmistakable, and it imprints you, and for that split second the world stops and everything — all logic, all reason — simply falls away.”

You feel pulled toward them as if something electric is pressing you forward and you want to run, because somewhere in you, you already know this will bring suffering, the pain but you go toward it anyway because something deeper than logic insists it is necessary, that you will be changed by it, and that the changing is the whole point.Once they leave, the grief is layered in ways you aren’t  prepared for. It is not only their absence you are mourning but the part of yourself that went along with them, the version of you. And you carry, in return, an imprint of them, a piece of their soul folded into yours, permanent and weightless in the same breath.

You might be wondering if it is worth it, all that pain and heartbreak and grief that arrives in waves sometimes years later, triggered by something as small as a certain quality of afternoon light. I would say, without hesitation and without any shadow of doubt, two hundred percent yes, because the love you experience in these encounters has no ceiling, and you transform, and you evolve, and you emerge each time as someone you could not have become without them. They come, they awaken something in you, they stoke a fire you did not know was there, and once the purpose between you is complete they leave, and they do not disappear, because they live permanently in your heart and your mind and your soul.

They were never yours to possess, and how could you possess yourself? We humans have a habit of trying to own the things and people we love, to hold them in place as though permanence were the measure of what something meant. Even our own bodies are not ours to possess in any final sense, because in due course they too wither away, and everything passes through, and what passes through still leaves something permanent behind in the passing.

I have realised each one of us meets soulmates, often more than one, and they are intense and unforgettable and the glint in their eye is a thing that cannot be replicated, cannot be faked, and cannot be forgotten no matter how much time puts itself between you and that moment. As I write this, I can recall each face with a vividness that catches me off guard, the glint, the warmth, the electric certainty of it all completely intact after everything.

I have come to understand that soulmates are not destinations to arrive at and stay. They are arrivals, brief and blazing and necessary, and they come to remind you of an integral part of yourself that was always there, waiting to be remembered. In carrying them with you, you carry yourself more fully than you ever could alone.

Have you met yours?