Your woundmate is not your perfect match, though they will feel like it at first.

Your woundmate is the person with whom you share an immediate, electrifying connection. Your chemistry is palpable. Your similarities are jarring. You cannot believe that you have met someone who is so much like you.

Your woundmate understands you in a way that nobody else ever has, or maybe ever will. It is as though they can see more deeply into your soul than anyone else. It is as though you have finally found the person you were looking for your entire life.

Your woundmate will enter your relationship with promises, with words of affirmation and intent. They will tell you that they have never felt this way before, that you are the partner of their dreams. They will tell you that they are magnetized to you, that they cannot imagine life without you.

But this energy is followed by something darker, something more sinister. There’s an unwillingness to commit, despite all the nice words. There’s a pattern of rage, you’re on and off, off and on. You trigger each other in the deepest and most visceral ways. You are at once elated and devastated. You have met a woundmate.

Your woundmate is the person with whom you share a connection over unresolved emotional problems. Yes, your soulmate will also bring to light what needs to heal. But the difference is that a soulmate offers you the opportunity for healing, whereas the woundmate re-opens the wound, and then leaves you to deal with it yourself.

“When two souls meet in the deep within, all kinds of emotional debris can rise into awareness, including that of the unresolved collective. To the extent that the couple is willing to own and clear the debris, the connection can grow in karmic stature,” Jeff Brown, who created the term, explains.

“By contrast, wound-mates are those that trigger the debris, but they do not have the capacity for relational expansion. They flounder in the mud, trigger after trigger, downward spiral after downward spiral, attached at the waste. They drag both individuals down even if they have the intention to grow through the challenges.”

Your woundmate seems so much like you because they are you. You are a splitting image of one another, carrying the dark parts of yourself that you never let anyone else see.

You are romanced by this. You have an equal desire to dissolve all of that anxiety into an all-consuming relationship. Soon enough, you recognize that this relationship is actually mirroring the part of you that needs to heal, not who you really are. You recognize that this relationship is showing you the parent that hurt you, the kids that bullied you, the emotional scarring you’ve never softened, and healed.

Your woundmate actually shows you the feeling of being lost and rejected, and you jump at the chance to heal it with an intoxicating romance that makes you feel finally accepted, finally free.

But this is not what real love is, and it is certainly not what a  partner who is right for you does.

You will never survive a woundmate relationship, nor are you meant to. When people are jaded by love, it is often because they have only ever been in a relationship with a woundmate, not someone who truly sees them, and is most compatible to them.

Your woundmate is the person who shows you what needs to heal, your soulmate is the person who helps you heal it, and build a healthy, happy life in place of what used to be ruins.

You are not meant to spend your life in the company of a woundmate, but your emotions might trick you into thinking you should. Sometimes, that fiery passion is not so much cluing us into a divine connection, but a deep part of ourselves that needs to rise to a new life, and carry on.