Once upon a time, Aristophanes relates, there were gods in the heaven and human down on earth.
But we humans didn't look the way we look today. Instead we each had two heads, four legs and four arms, a perfect melding, in other words, of two people join together, seamlessly united into one being.
We came in three different possible gender or sexual variations: male/female melding, male/male melding and female/female melding, depending on what suited each creature the best.
Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy.
Thus all of us double headed, eight limbed, perfectly contented creatures moved across the earth much the same as way that planets travel through the heavens, dreamily, orderly, smoothly.we lacked for nothing, we had no unmet needs, we wanted nobody. There was no strife and no chaos. We were whole.
But in our wholeness, we became overly proud. In our pride, we neglected to worship the gods. The mighty Zeus punished us for our neglect by cutting all the double-headed, eight limbed, perfectly contented humans in half, thereby creating a world of cruelly severed one headed, two armed, two legged, miserable creatures.
In this moment of this mess amputation, Zeus inflicted on mankind, that most painful of human conditions; the dull and constant sense that we are not quite whole, for the rest of time, human would be born sensing that there was some missing part – a lost half, which love almost more than we love ourselves. And that this missing part was out there someplace spinning through the universe in the form of another person.
We would also born believing that if only we search relentlessly enough, we might someday find that vanished half, that other soul.
This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one, will somehow, someday equal one.
From "Committed" by Elizabeth Gilbert
