All I want for Christmas is a new soulmate

I'm exhausted. I'm getting home ASAP and sleeping, I'm so tired.

You know what I want more than anything in life, I think?

Someone who thinks about and cares about the world like I do and who'll keep me company in that concern, support me in my efforts and in my life, and challenge me to do better, to think better, and to be a better person. Someone who enjoys a healthy lovelife and who has a kinky side would be nice, too:).

Most of all, I want a best friend. I want someone who shares my interests and whose interests I can share. I want someone that I want to spend all my free time with because she's just that fun to be around. I want someone who is constantly amazing me with her knowledge, understanding, love, compassion, courage and commitment.

I want to be with someone of substance who cares more about being a person of substance than any of the million more petty concerns that most people take up in life.

I want someone I respect to be my best friend and lover and all-around decent human being in my life.

I want someone in my life who I can persistently think, "I wonder what she thinks about this?"

I want someone who makes sense, generally, when we disagree and challenges me to make more sense in my own thinking and who agrees on all the important stuff that really matters.

I want a lover without pretension but who doesn't settle for second best as a human being. I want someone who engages in some friendly competition around who can be smarter, more decent, more loving, more charming, more reliable, and an all-around-great-mind-and-heart-to-spend-time-with.

What I want for Christmas this year is someone who will make my heart ache so badly when she passes on after years of marriage because the world so rarely sees such a decent human being.

I don't have many people, if at all, that I look up to, anymore. I have plenty of people I admire and respect and love. But rarely do I meet anymore and think, "God, they have all their priorities straight. That's someone whose wisdom I need to follow because my own priorities pale by comparison."

But that's who I want for a soulmate. Someone who inspires me and impresses me, or aspires to do all of these things.

That's all I want for Christmas.

Someone who senses my lonliness in a world where everyone seems to have a million excuses for why we can't make the world better in the big ways and who seeks to be my companion in making the world better despite the excuses of its inhabitants. Someone who likes thinking for its own sake. And who aspires to adopt my strengths and challenge them and me to get stronger, rather than try to make me feel bad for all the qualities that make me a great guy, I think.

This Christmas, I want someone who I think, "I think that is likely the best mom for my kids that I could ever meet." And who thinks the same about me.

Because, ultimately, I'm learning, that sums up everything I want in a woman. Someone who will be a mom for my kids, a best friend for me, and an amazing person in her own right, that I can bask in the glow of my admiration for what an amazing catch I have snagged.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Happy Hanukah. Happy New Year.

Love,
Ben