The Destructive Fantasy of Finding a Soulmate

Americans are getting married later in life than ever, and the top reason they give to get married is finally finding their soul mate (Leonhardt et al., 2020). The top obstacle they identify is not having found that one person yet. Meanwhile, older ideas about individual psychology and its relationship to marital satisfaction (e.g., Franiuk et al., 2002) are yielding to ideas about the marital system. For example, Li et al. (2023) found that perceptions of one’s partner’s responsiveness made up for a lot on the road to relational happiness.

Dates More Like Job Interviews

In my experience working with couples, the search for a soulmate does a lot more harm than merely delaying marriage. It can turn dates into something more like job interviews, where both people put on a performance to make the other person think they have found the right one. It’s desirable, of course, to foreground your most appealing qualities on a date, but it does not further a goal of relational satisfaction to invent them. A small but illustrative example is pretending to like certain music or activities to make your date think they have found "the One." This locks the couple into a kind of reality show proving or disproving soulmate status instead of the more important question of whether the couple can build together the kind of relationship each of them wants to inhabit.

On a job interview, it’s generally a bad idea to say what job you’re really looking for: “I know you’re looking for an assistant, but I could run this place.” They’ll think you won’t do the work assigned to an assistant. It’s also a bad idea to say why you really want the job (i.e., the income and the location). Instead, you’re expected to make up a romance about the industry: “I want to flip burgers because feeding people at a reasonable cost is my passion.” And, yet, the most important topic on a date is the kind of relationship the couple wants to build, the jobs that they are looking to create and fill. This is even more important now that churches have receded as definers of marital roles.

I’m glad there are so many varieties of satisfying relationships these days, but the assumption that a dating couple is on the same page is unsustainable. “Soulmate” implies that you want the same thing, but the variety of options implies that very few people want the same thing. These need to be discussed. A simple but telling example might be whether you want to have children. There are still communities where it is assumed that the reason for dating is childbearing, but it’s something that needs to be discussed in most places. I know it’s not sexy to write an ad about the aspects of a relationship that you would insist on, and I know it’s not romantic to pare those down to their minimums, but, in a society without rigid definitions, it’s smart to spell these things out.

Suppression of Conflict

Another harm caused by searching for a soulmate is the suppression of conflict that it leads to. Your potential partner tries to play a role rather than communicate their own agenda, so their own agenda is not put up for discussion. More importantly, conflicts are seen as signs that it’s not the right person, so their existence is hidden. One of the best uses of a date is the exploration of whether the two people can address and resolve a conflict, whether it’s about what to order, where to meet, or which movie to see.

In a cancel culture, you’ll want to check that your dating partner is open to complexity (since you yourself are complex). If they’re not, they’re not ready for a real relationship. If you yourself are not ready for a real relationship, work on your appreciation of complexity instead of picking people who might be perfect for you and end up disappointing you.

The search for a soulmate keeps you oriented toward trading up. As you discover the one you’re with is friendly, attractive, and reliable, the perfectionistic standard in your head can’t help but notice that they are not perfect for you. The idea that there is such a person keeps you looking for them.

The idea of a soulmate can make you pass on a potential partner who would make you deliriously happy but who also happens to have a tin ear and can’t harmonize with you in the car, who is attractive enough for your own arousal but doesn’t draw jealous looks from your friends, who has a stable income but no trust fund, and so on. Instead of building a house together that suits your needs, you will forever be a renter, imagining your dream home in lush detail.

The search for a soulmate, then, delays commitment, fosters a performative approach to the relationship, restricts discussions of what the parties are looking for in a relationship, suppresses rather than resolves conflicts as they arise, casts potential partners in simple rather than complex roles, stimulates fantasies of finding someone better, and turns the perfect into the enemy of the good (in the well-worn phrase). Ironically, these are the very practices that lead to relational satisfaction. If you collaborate around defining and creating a relationship that optimizes your satisfactions and resolves your conflicts, and if you both commit to it, you and your good-enough partner can turn each other into soulmates.