Love’s Fate, Love’s Destiny

‘Fate’ and ‘destiny’ are words and symbols of powerfully felt experiences and emotions, whether we deeply believe ourselves truly fated or destined or not. Romeo and Juliet were ‘star-crossed lovers’, and their appointment by the very stars of heaven not only fittingly reflected the transcendent nature of those powerful interior emotions, but also was befitting of the exterior circumstances of their untimely demise. Yet in the context of love the difference and similarity of fate and destiny are significant.

Fate, often with unfavorable connotations, is decided by an outside agency; a ‘fatality’ is an unwelcome end not chosen, we accept our (regrettable) fate, and we decide another’s fate. Fate refers to a predetermined future, an inevitable final outcome, status, or situation, the terminal full stop; yet as such ‘fate’ may also refer to events that are past or presently occurring but since they are ‘required’ for the final future fate they too are predetermined and inevitable: ‘it was fated they should meet now, for thirty years hence they would know each other upon their final field of battle.’

Destiny, often with positive connotations, is willfully participated in and accomplished by a person for themselves; we ‘make our own destiny’ and chose travel destinations. Destiny refers to one’s chosen course of action, yet as such it also may refer to past or present events that enable a person to achieve their chosen destiny, or even what must still yet happen before they accomplish their chosen destiny.

Thirty years is a lot of fate and destiny to have in my past before falling so deeply in love with my wife. Yet my experience of fate includes being who I am, and my interior composition, uxorious among many things, is something I do not feel I could change if I wanted to, and in the process of becoming more at ease with myself and becoming myself more fully, I experience a sense of fate revealing itself. As I choose (destiny) to increase the intimacy in our relationship, I experience a sense of our ‘having arrived’ (destination, destiny), but also a sense of all things past combining to arrive at a coordinated present (outside agency, fate, inevitability). Thus I find an accurate statement of my experience is: The destiny I have chosen seems, to me, to be my fate.