Assuming Jenny and I are soulmates and are meant to be together (hey, we did well on this quiz!) let’s examine how close we could have come to never meeting.

Meeting your soulmate is no easy task. The odds that you attend the same school, work in the same place, or bump into each other in the bathroom (let’s be open to all types of soulmates, please) are slim. Obviously, Jenny and I had our own difficulty in making it happen. She grew up in a place with rice patties growing on every street corner in the Philippines. Meanwhile, I was in the United States eating chicken patties for lunch every day.

Pre-Internet, the odds of us ever having contact looked minuscule. She’d need to flee the Philippines for the American dream or I’d need to go there to escape conviction.

By chance, we were both born in the same era and at a time when you could meet people on the other side of the world. I’m doubtful Jenny would’ve come to the US for any reason. I also can’t imagine doing charity work in the Philippines. Only because we both had a passion for writing on WordPress were we able to find our soulmate.

But what if we didn’t meet? What if we made slightly different life decisions?

A simple change in our timeline would’ve been choosing a different blogging platform. Imagine if one of us decided to create a Blogspot blog instead of being cool kids on WordPress. This single decision would have cost us a lifetime of shared misery.

There’s something in science and Ashton Kutcher’s filmography called The Butterfly Effect. Basically, one small event can trigger a whole string of others. For instance, a butterfly could fart in Iowa and cause an earthquake in China; hence the name.

I don’t like to think about how one slight change to our decisions could’ve cost us our relationship. It makes me teary-eyed, sometimes. Or maybe I need to clean this onion from my three-day old mustache I have going on.

When we get married, we all like to believe the person we’re about to sign a slip of paper with is the one we’ll spend the rest of our lives with. What if you never happen to meet that person?

I have no doubts Jenny is the one for me. However, I do sometimes wonder if a Timmy in an alternate reality isn’t so lucky.

Reality is, Jenny and I did find our soulmates. We’re fortunate there. Not everyone is.

For those still in search of theirs, remember to put yourself out there. When you think you’ve found them, don’t be afraid to, as Jenny would say, declare your love.

Or, you know, make them a really big meal and get them to do it.