The Ex-tasy of the Soulmate

The city of Lisbon has a very peculiar way of rubbing loneliness in our faces. It's not a slap; it's a slow torture, served on a terrace full of couples in Príncipe Real on a Sunday afternoon, while you stare at your phone screen waiting for a message that will never arrive. We grew up consuming the rigorous diet of Hollywood and summer romances, convinced that somewhere between Baixa and Avenidas Novas was our "soulmate"—that mythological being, perfectly aligned with our neuroses, who would know exactly how to order our coffee and who could read our minds without needing to open their mouths.

But then, youth fades away with the gentleness of a winter electricity bill, and reality comes knocking at our door. We look at our romantic history and, instead of a destiny written in the stars, what we have is a catalog of surgically precise mismatches: the guy from the dating app who ghosted me after swearing eternal intimacy over the second coffee, the digital nomad who treated us like a tour guide, and the eternally indecisive one who hyperventilates at the mere mention of the word "relationship." Nobody has stories to remember anymore, nor do they have breakfast at the Portuguese Bakery. Instead, we have relationships we try to forget as quickly as possible and breakfasts at seven in the morning.

We pretend we don't care. We don our cynicism, pay for our own dinners, toast to independence, and laugh at those friends who are already hibernating on the couch, domesticated by monogamy. After all, we're modern. We're detached. Love is nothing more than a conservative social construct, right?

Wrong. Last week, I finally managed to close a project that had been keeping me awake at night and sane for months. I went home with that intoxicating feeling of having accomplished something, a small victory that deserved, at the very least, a celebration. I opened the door to my apartment, looked at the empty room, at the white walls that echoed no sound, and the weight of that silence completely crushed me. Pride suddenly gave way to a lump in my throat. Seriously, I kind of hate myself for saying this, but sometimes I really feel sad for not having a soulmate who cares about me. No special guy to congratulate me on my achievements... damn soulmates, and I don't even know if I believe in soulmates anymore!

It's the tragic duality of our generation: we repudiate the cliché, but we mourn its absence in the dark. We reject blind dependence, but secretly we would give anything to have someone at the end of the day refill our wine glass and simply ask how it went.

And I couldn't help but wonder: am I naive? Are we all looking for the missing piece in the wrong puzzle?

Perhaps, in this unforgiving city that devours and saves us in equal measure, we can be each other's soulmates. And the men? Well, they're just those great guys you're having fun with along the way.