I’ve been through my fair share of breakups. In fact, my most recent one was last month. I’ll spare you the details but it left me thinking: is there such a thing as “the one”? Or is each relationship just a mélange of random circumstances and individuals whose compatibility is based on which side of the river they grew up, whether or not they wear ankle socks, and sheer luck? I voice-noted all this to a friend while garnering more than my usual fair share of pitying looks in the Sainsbury’s checkout queue and was buoyed when she replied almost instantly: “No!!!! ur soulmate is coming, you just need to write your list and raise your vibration.”
She wasn’t referring to my ringtone or propensity to fidget. In the rhetoric of New Age spirituality, every person, object or emotion has its own unique “frequency” and in order to manifest something you must alter your own frequency to match the thing you want. Two years ago, this kind of jargon was limited to the eccentric colleague who, after undergoing a toad venom cleanse in Ibiza, decided to retrain as a yoga instructor, grow a rat-tail and extol the anti-ageing properties of snail slime. But since the pandemic, I would be hard pushed to find a friend who doesn’t check their vibrations, hasn’t Googled their partner’s astrological birth chart or used the term “my truth” or “manifested” at least once in the past month.
