When it comes to the vocation to marriage, Catholics sometimes lean towards one of two extremes. Some of us are drawn towards the secular, romantic concept of a “soulmate,” that there’s one person out there somewhere just for you. Others reject this in favor of the idea that, since marriage is a natural vocation, it doesn’t particularly matter who you choose (or who chooses you), so long as you’re both free to marry one another, and like each other sufficiently well. If the first one is the “soulmate” view, we might call the second one the “warm body” view. It’s decidedly less romantic. But are either of these views correct?
On the contrary, a richer understanding of the theology of vocations is important for approaching marriage (and priesthood and religious life) in a healthier way. The word “vocation” comes from the Latin vocare, “to call.” Every “vocation” is a calling from God. So in this sense, we can say that everyone has a vocation to become a saint, since we know that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4).
But God doesn’t just say, “go be a saint” in some generic and un-nuanced way. After all, there are as many different types of saints as there are saints. Rather, he has a plan for you specifically. As King David proclaims in Psalm, “Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Ps. 139:16). In the words of the Pontifical Work for Ecclesiastical Vocations, “holiness is the universal vocation of every man, it is the main road onto which converge all the little paths that are particular vocations.”
To be a saint is our universal calling. How we get there is the little path of “particular vocations.” That includes “vocation” in the way we often use that term (am I called to priesthood? marriage? religious life?), but it means something more specific yet. If you’re called to diocesan priesthood, for which diocese? If you’re called to religious life, for which community? If you’re called to marriage, to whom?
But it’s possible to take the particularity of God’s call in an extreme direction, and that’s the danger of the idea of “soulmates.” The danger here is twofold. First, if you imagine that, in the entire world, there’s one and only one person God is okay with you marrying, those daunting odds are likely to be debilitating. I’m reminded here of the song “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric (familiar to some readers from the movie Stranger than Fiction, in which it was performed by Will Ferrell), in which the singer laments:
When I was a young boy
My mama said to me
“There’s only one girl in the world for you
And she probably lives in Tahiti”
I’d go the whole wide world
I’d go the whole wide world just to find her
If that was how the vocation to marriage looked, virtually none of us would ever manage to get married.
But the second danger is that this romantic vision of “soulmates” can easily become selfish and unrealistic: we imagine that our true vocation is to find the one person in the world who can complete us and solve all of our problems. But that’s not what a real vocation looks like at all. As Pope Francis has warned, “no vocation is born of itself or lives for itself.” Every true calling from God is a call to deeper love: for us to grow both in our love of him and in our service towards our neighbor (whether that means serving our spouse, our religious community, our parish, or something else).
Instead, on the road towards sanctity, we’re called to discern what’s in front of us. Where is God calling me right now? Who is God asking me to serve today, and how? Whether we’ve found our vocational state in life or not, we should be in the habit of asking this of God regularly, and being open to whatever answer he may give us. This is a surer way to proceed towards our ultimate vocation of “saint” than either pining after an imagined soulmate or marrying the first person willing to put up with us.