Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, everyone expects true love. Fairy tales are filled with stories about sleeping beauties and love’s true kisses, star-joined destinies of princes and princesses, and even the occasional cosmic meet cute. Happily ever after abounds as the conclusion to these romantic myths, and we all buy in. Then we grow up and out of the fictions and fantasies and into the dirt and grime of real life and find that the real McCoy doesn’t exactly come in the package the mascot mouse sold us.

Or does it?

The divinely feminine half of Soul Bond, Jennifer Lee Collins, discovered the spiritual nature of life early, when she was introduced to astrology at twelve. She dove right in for decades, learning on her own and lapping up everything she could find in books, teachers, and the song of the spheres above. Then the lockdown hit and she spent three years learning everything she could to launch Planets + Purpose, an astrology business dedicated to sharing her earned wisdom with others. She even started a farm and training to be a herbalist. By that time, though, the romance she had been promised failed to present itself and she was prepared to die alone.

The sacredly profane masculine half of Soul Bond, Andrew Marc Rowe, followed a different path. An avowed atheist for most of his adolescence and young adulthood, a crash course in the art of depression and anxiety saw him hit his rock bottom and travel to Peru, where the world of plant medicine shamanism blew his top and made him rethink everything he had assumed about the nature of God and reality. Picking up his spiritual weapon, the pen, Andrew began to write… and write… and write. With a few breaks to drink and serve cacao in ceremony. A published author of potty-mouthed fiction with a mythological bent, with over twenty books to his name, as well as a certificate carrying cacao ceremony leader, he too had been burned by life and was contemplating his own lonely mortality.

Ram Dass said that it’s only when we give it all up that we can have it all. Jennifer and Andrew learned the truth in that statement all too well when they finally, at long last, came together. The meeting of Andrew and Jennifer set off a blast that sent a cosmic shockwave rippling out like a nuclear love bomb in both of their lives, changing and blending dividing lines until they finally were reborn as Soul Bond.

Or, if brevity ain’t your thang, The Artists Formerly Known As Jennifer And Andrew.