Ah, yes! To love and to be in love is the greatest joy two people can share and if it begins in younger years and continues through old age it’s as perfect as it can be. But not everyone gets to have that good fortune. Sometimes circumstances bring an end to a beautiful romance way too soon. What might have been meant to be is now never to be.

William Shakespeare wrote a play about two star-crossed lovers named Romeo and Juliet whose love was forbidden by their feuding families. In the Middle Ages, there’s the tale of Lady Guinevere, married to King Arthur, falling in love with Sir Lancelot, one of the heralded Knights of the Round Table and that relationship was doomed from the beginning. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, “The Great Gatsby,” Daisy Buchanan’s love affair with Jay Gatsby ends unfulfilled because she tells him, “Rich girls can’t marry poor boys.” Most of us have seen the movie, Titanic and the tragic, yet heartfelt relationship between Jack and Rose is left incomplete when the cruise ship breaks apart and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

Just fiction, one might say, but fiction is often based upon a certain degree of fact. Suppose that Romeo and Juliet were a boy and a girl that Shakespeare had actually known and they were to be granted a second chance to be in love in a future period of time and the same opportunity was given to Lancelot with Guinevere and Jack with Rose?

There is increasing scientific evidence of the reincarnated human soul. This allows for the possibility that the souls of two people in love in 1574 can come together in this lifetime to complete their unfinished love story. If this can be true, then somewhere in time, those with forbidden romances like Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere and Jack and Rose will get to finish what they had started.

Remembering we had been someone else in a past life is more common that one might think. In the song, “Timeless,” Taylor Swift sings, “Down the block there’s an antique shop and something in my head said, ‘Stop ... black and white photos ... two lovers laughin’ on the porch, the kinda love you only find once in a lifetime ... and that’s when I called you and it’s so hard to explain, but in these photos, I saw us instead and somehow, I know that you and I would have found each other in another life.”

There have been numbers of soldiers killed in wars who had left letters written to their loved ones with promises made that transcended time. “If we cannot have this lifetime together, I will wait a thousand years until we can have another.”

Empty words, we might say, but it’s not beyond the possibilities of the universe that two people who meet for the first time, feel an inexplicable familiarity with each other. They have an intuition that links them together from a relationship they might have shared hundreds of years ago.

Author J. Sterling wrote, “I recognized you instantly. All of our lives flashed before my mind in a split second. I felt a pull so strongly towards you that I almost couldn’t stop it.”

Writer Kamand Kojouri said, “Maybe love at first sight isn’t what we think it is. Maybe it’s recognizing a soul we loved in a past life and falling in love with them again.”

Reincarnation has brought a fair degree of controversy into scientific studies, but now scientists believe that our souls are immortal and can travel though space and time. Perhaps a love that was meant to be can again be. An anonymous person wrote, “I am one of the biggest skeptics you will find, but the law of attraction is not mythical as many believe. There is no guarantee, but the universe can pull you back into someone you once loved instead of any random person.”

Author Roya Backlund says, “When you meet someone that you have shared a long spiritual history with, it’s as if there’s already a deeper understanding between you. It’s as if you already understand things about each other that you shouldn’t. There’s no need to fill every moment of silence with words. You don’t feel pressured into putting on a front in their presence. You can literally communicate with each other with a simple look, knowing that whatever is on one’s mind will be immediately sensed by the other.”

A man in love can take a fatal bullet on the battlefield. A woman in love might die in a car crash or pass away from an awful disease, but if souls are immortal, then love is eternal and someday they will resume their relationships with the words, “Have we met before?” They will write new chapters to their love stories that had begun years before they were born, stories that might even last beyond two lifetimes, stories that will have no end.

If you have the good fortune to look into the eyes of the person you love, just imagine that the two of you were once Cleopatra and Mark Antony or perhaps you were two teenagers whose love for each other ended tragically during the American Civil War. Now you are together again through the grace of God and through a random travel of souls through space and time.

Love has come at second sight from then to now and forever it shall be.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com