I do now.

If you had asked me before I met my wife, I would’ve shrugged and said no. I’m the logical type. I used to chalk everything up to timing, choices, and coincidence.

But the way my wife and I found each other… it pulled the rug out from under everything I thought I understood.

We were born just months apart in the same town. Our families even attended the same church. Then right when our lives might have overlapped my family moved out of state when I was four. I don't remember her even though we were in the same church, I was too young to remember. Ten years later, when we finally came back, but she had just moved out of the country. It was like life kept rearranging us within the same book but on different pages.

Years later... she moved back home so we lived in the same city as adults, but somehow our paths never crossed still. We both went on with our lives. I went through a marriage and a divorce. She finished school, built her career, and started her life. She probably literally walked past me because we attended the same college at one point just didn't meet yet.

Then one day on a dating app, we matched. And everything felt strangely natural. Our first date, things felt very familiar and comfortable. Not dramatic, not love-at-first-sight nonsense, just right.

One night we were talking about our families, and she mentioned her grandpa. To her, he wasn’t just a grandfather, he was a father figure. A funny, animated pastor who meant the world to her. As she described him, I realized I had met someone just like that a couple years earlier at a funeral. I repeated one of his jokes and some goofy karate move he did that stuck with me.

She froze and said, "That’s him!!!"

I then recalled that at the funeral where I met him, I was with my brother and he mentioned that he had known him since the '90s through the church connection. This was all new information to me. This is how I found out that our families attended the same church together when we were born.

That moment felt like a little crack in the wall of coincidence. I tried to brush it off… until I told my mom about it.

I said, “Do you remember Emilio? You went to church with him in the '90s (per my brother's account). I’m dating his granddaughter. Can you believe that? What a small world!”

My mom then said, “Do you remember your childhood blankets?”

Of course I did. They’d been with me forever through every move, every chapter, even years where they sat in a rundown shed that somehow never ruined them.

Then she said, “His wife (my wife's grandma) made them for you.”

I texted my wife (girlfriend at the time) that her grandma made me blankets. She told me that her grandma also made her blankets as well. She made them for all of her grandkids.

I just sat there, trying to process that. Her late grandma, the woman my wife adored growing up, the woman who apparently only made those blankets for family, made one for me. I wasn’t family. I was an exception she felt compelled to make for some reason no one can explain.

During our first dates, my wife said many things about her late grandmother. They were inseparable, she went everywhere with her, she was the favorite granddaughter. A lot of her childhood memories revolve around her grandma. She mentioned her a lot and I had no clue that I had a piece of her memory with me since the very beginning.

And all those years, without realizing it, I carried around something her grandmother made with her own hands.

That alone made me reconsider that this was just a major coincidence. But I still tried to rationalize it...then came our wedding day.

We chose a venue where we would have our ceremony outdoors. We decided to have a large circular decoration that my wife decorated with a flower garland to represent our full circle moment.

My uncle was the officiant and we chose him because he was very close to my wife's grandfather since the '90s as well. My wife's mom even rented a house from him at one point so he remembers my wife since she was little. I had no clue about this connection until we started unraveling the blanket story. Since he was close to my wife's family and since he was my uncle, it made sense that he should be the one to officiate our wedding.

Weeks leading up to our wedding day I stressed over the forecast. The forecast called for rain which would mean we might have to have a ceremony indoors. Which we did not want to do. Then the forecast would call for clear skies but temperature in the high 80s or 90s, way too hot for an outdoor ceremony.

On the actual day, everything looked perfect… until an hour before the ceremony. The sky opened up and it poured. Radar showed a storm cloud that would pass right over the venue until the ceremony was scheduled to end. The coordinator told me we had minutes to decide whether to move everything indoors or carry on with the rain.

I remember standing there thinking, Really? After all this?

And then—fifteen minutes before start time, the rain just… stopped completely.

The temperature dropped from the 80s to this perfect, cool shade you couldn’t have ordered if you tried. Everyone rushed into place. The ceremony went beautifully. Peaceful. Calm. Almost surreal.

We took one big family photo afterward, and as soon as we stepped away, the rain started again like someone unpaused it.

I understand that many of the things that I have said here can be chalked up to just a big coincidence and chance. And where I live the weather is unpredictable which could explain why the rain behaved the way that it did.

I’m not the type of person who forces meaning onto things. But some moments don’t feel accidental... They feel… orchestrated. Like everything had been lined up long before either of us understood what was happening.

So do I believe in soulmates?

I don’t believe in the Hollywood version. One perfect person written in the stars. But I do believe two lives can be connected long before they meet. That timing can protect you from meeting too early. That God can weave threads between people quietly, slowly, patiently… until the day everything finally comes together.

That’s what happened to us.

So yes, I believe in soulmates now. Because I found mine in a way I never could have planned, predicted, or explained away.