Ever since Rowan turned five years old, we have read a chapter of a book each night before bed. The book changes, but the routine remains the same. It is the highlight of my night, and he has come to enjoy it too. This year, we have read probably two thousand pages consisting of The Trumpet of the Swan; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Call of the Wild; Gulliver’s Travels; The Little Prince; Charlotte’s Web; The Little Pilgrim’s Progress; Stuart Little; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; and right now we are finishing up White Fang. I have been surprised at what I have learned through these children’s books. My favorite so far has been The Little Prince and I’ll summarize the plot below and give some insight into why this book has become special to me.
The narrator is an aircraft pilot who crashes into the Sahara desert far from any other humans. To his shock, he runs into a visitor from another planet–a boy with blonde hair named “the little prince.” Over the next few days in the desert, the little prince recounts his adventures to the narrator who is busily trying to fix his plane. Many topics are covered during their eight days together, but the one that really stuck with me was their conversation on love.
The little prince lived on planet B-612 and on this planet there was only one flower–a rose. This was the most special creation to him because it was the only flower on his planet. He talked to the rose, watered the rose, picked the caterpillars off the rose, and put a glass globe over the rose at night to protect her from the cold wind. His life revolved around making sure his rose was protected and loved. The little prince, while visiting Earth, came upon a rose garden. In this garden were hundreds of roses all as beautiful as the one back on planet B-612. The sudden realization that he had spent an enormous amount of his life’s energy caring for what he now knew to be a common rose depressed him.
Saddened about his rose, the little prince soon comes across a fox who asks for the prince to tame him. The little prince is perplexed why the fox should wish to be tamed by him. The fox then explains that to tame something is to “establish ties.” He goes on to say.
“To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.”
The little prince and the fox become friends and eventually, as they both knew would happen, the day came that the little prince had to depart. Both the fox and the prince were sorrowful. Before they said their farewell, the fox instructed the prince to “Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world.” The little prince trudged off, as the fox commanded, to look at the rose garden. At the sight of the hundreds of roses in the garden, the lesson the fox had been teaching him became clear. Looking over the roses, the little prince spoke the following words.
“You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first saw him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now to me, he is unique in all the world. You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passer-by would think that my rose looked just like you–the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except for two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.”
The little prince learned an important lesson that I think we need to consider with respect to the common usage of the term “soulmate.” When I hear people talk about soulmates, it is typically used in the context of a sequence of unlikely events that leads to the pairing of two people who each have found the best, most suitable companion out of all humans on earth. If having a soulmate were synonymous with finding the best match, then I think many people would end up like the little prince when he discovers that he doesn’t have the only rose in the universe. I believe that soulmates are created, not found. A good relationship starts with a good match–I don’t deny that. But once you’ve chosen a good partner, it’s the life that you build together that turns this mate into your soulmate. It’s the activities you’ve done together, the movies you’ve laughed over, the places you’ve been, the joys and the sorrows you’ve shared. It’s the time spent together, the children that you’ve made, loved, and raised. The culmination of your experiences together as a couple bond you in a way that is unique in all the world and that is what makes your partner your soulmate. That is what separates your rose from the garden.
My rose is my soulmate not because she is the only rose. She is my soulmate because “it is she that I have watered; because she is my rose.”
Thomas Rainey 