“Soulmates aren’t the ones who make you happiest, no. They’re instead the ones who make you feel the most. Burning edges and scars and stars. Old pains and pangs, captivation and beauty. Strain and shadows and worry and yearning. Sweetness and madness and dreamlike surrender. They hurl you into the abyss. They taste like hope.” ~ Victoria Erickson

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I write a lot about soulmates. People say, “Write what you know,” and this I know.

I recognize soul contracts. I spot soulmates in my life almost immediately. I work tirelessly with people who are grieving the end of a relationship with a soulmate, not understanding why they came into their lives at all if they weren’t meant to be together, and unable to accept that the contract is complete and it’s simply time to let it go.

There are the beautiful soulmates—the ones who bring out the best in us.

There are the ones who elevate us to a higher version of ourselves.

There are the ones who bring to us a part of our soul that we had lost, and once they give it to us, we finally feel whole again. And although I don’t believe that people make us complete and whole—because that comes 100 percent from within—there are certain people who come into our lives holding a piece of us we had momentarily lost.

But there is another type of soulmate I’ve written about before. It’s a topic that needs to be expanded upon because most of us have felt this kind of connection and it’s the toughest to let go of. It’s intense and, for a short period of time, it feels magical. Often, it leaves us feeling like we’ll never meet anyone quite like this again.

Introducing the Wrecking Ball Soulmate…

This soulmate is not somebody who comes into our life peacefully. They enter in to shake things up. They challenge us and make us question everything we thought we knew about life. There is a clear “before them” and “after them” distinction when we look back on our lives and realize that we are now a completely different person than we were the day we met them.

This type of soulmate can come in many forms, but it’s normally a romantic relationship that leaves us feeling as if we’ve been swept up like a tornado, taken for the ride of our life, and then dumped from the sky with no warning in an exhausted heap.

Despite feeling like we don’t know what the hell happened, since the ride was so fun when it first started, the beauty of this type of soulmate is that like a tornado hitting and leaving mass wreckage behind, we’re forced to rebuild from the ground up. We can now make our new home—ourselves—anything we want. 

We can rebuild something completely different and even more beautiful than what existed before. 

Oh, what fun when we first meet this type of soulmate! They can come in the form of a friend, an immediate physical attraction, or a “Holy sh*t, I was knocked off my feet the moment I laid eyes on them” connection.

But the fun ends quickly. In my case, this soulmate came in the form of a friend. We like to convince ourselves that these are the connections we can trust; we like to believe that a friend wouldn’t hurt us.

But these types of soulmates have called us into their lives for their own soul growth. And the growing they have to do is immense.

They are often unconscious of how their behavior and actions affect us. They will most likely come in and be everything we’re looking for in a friend or lover—fun, loving, attentive, thoughtful, often telling us how crazy they are about us or how much we mean to them. They pursue hard, because on a soul level, they absolutely need us.

But then they pull away. This type of soulmate often becomes distant, emotionally unavailable, and non-committal. Intimacy scares them, which is why their soul has called us in. They want to learn about deep intimacy and trust, but they may not necessarily be ready. And their lack of readiness can be soul-crushing for us because their “pull you in, pull away pattern” is how they cope with their own fear.

Other wrecking ball soulmates love intimacy. They’re all in. The relationship with them is fast, passionate, intense, and abundant in chemistry. So much so that they may become obsessive, jealous, and controlling very quickly. Their soul has called us in to learn “loving without attachment.” But often these soulmates are too insecure, afraid, and needy to be able to do this and they end up causing us a world of pain.

And then there are the wrecking ball soulmates who come in and blindside us. They’re the ones we never thought we’d fall for. Most of the time they’re married or in another relationship or we’re the ones who are married or in another relationship. Yet they’ve come in to reveal something to us we aren’t seeing or simply don’t want to see.

As hard as we try to control our emotions around them, we find ourselves falling hard. They’re like a drug we can’t get enough of, yet we want to quit because we know we ultimately can’t be with them. The stakes are too high. Being with them means breaking up another relationship, and most times we just aren’t ready to do that—and neither are they.

So letting go is the only option.

We have to let go of each of these soulmates eventually. They’re the ones who were always meant to come in (temporarily) and teach us something about ourselves, whether it be self-love, setting boundaries, placing more value on our worth, ending our patterns of being with people who can’t meet us where we’re at, revealing our insecurities, or showing us parts of ourselves that still need to be healed.

Don’t resist the letting go. Holding on will be too painful. Allow the tornado to come in and sweep you off your feet, but once you’re firmly planted on the ground again, dust yourself off and be willing to move forward.

Use the experience with these soulmates to build a stronger foundation for yourself. Take stock of what your own soul needed that attracted them in.

Be willing to learn the lesson so you don’t have to repeat it. Because wrecking ball soulmates are the hardest soul contracts to endure. And if you can get the lesson and do your own work once they’re gone, you’re one step closer to calling in that Divine Love Soulmate who will be by your side for the long haul.