Believe it or not some people still claim that that they have found or are still seeking a ‘soulmate’ who is the only ‘One’ ever intended to be THE ONE for them with which to match, ‘mate’ and live together with. Though I have a partner and husband I love and whom I never intend to lose, provided he thinks the same because I cannot assume this, would I say that this is is because he was always my intended soulmate rather than having become one with mutual work and learning? I think not. Yet Katie Bishop writing for the BBC online magazine in 2022 found a couple who believed that the story of their union occurring was strong evidence of being intended for each other, even before they met. This is how Bishop describes them:
Hannah Miller says she’s always believed in soulmates. She remembers being a child, hearing that seahorses have one partner forever. She loved the idea there might be just one person for her, too.
When she was 10, she was introduced to Sam, a friend of her sister’s, at a group outing to a theme park. She remembers him holding her hand on the scariest rides and her sister teasing her, saying she and Sam were going to get married. “It’s a bit embarrassing, but I did fall head over heels that day,” says Miller, 45, from Birmingham, UK. “I went on the school bus on Monday and told all my friends about the older boy who held my hand.”
She didn’t cross paths with the boy from the theme park again until she was 18, but once she did, things moved quickly. Weeks later, Sam told Hannah that he was falling in love with her, and the two were married just before her 20th birthday. “Commitment felt like it came easily – this was it, we were meant to be together, so why wait,” she says. “We knew that there was no reason not to get married, because we were soulmates.” [1]
Now this very definitely has the Aww! Factor as a story. It is the kind of story that connects with the magical thinking of childhood and romantic mythologies or mythologised understandings of natural history. It is the kind of story I would like to tell about my husband because there is enough in our story to suggest a coming together easily constructed as intended. But though we have been together for over forty years, I think this is not because he and only he was intended for me, or I for him.
After all, whom could I or he think did all this mutual and common intention-making with regard to us. The notion of the soulmate must suggest that the ‘soul’, however you conceive of it, is a thing amenable to inbuilt intentionality put there by some power – whether of enchantment or external plan – and discount every other factor in relationship building and sociocultural accident.
That predestined intention in soulmate unions can sometimes be understood by retrospective reconstruction arguing some kind of reincarnation from an earlier life or of a plan devised supernaturally, if the divine could be applied to such minutiae of human existence. But the best reconstruction story to explain love as a yearning g for a ‘soulmate’ Bishop attributes to Plato:
The Greek philosopher Plato wrote that humans once had four arms, four legs and two faces. He explained that Zeus split us in half as a punishment for our pride, and we were destined to walk the Earth searching for our other half.
Bishop rather simplifies the position. Though Plato wrote the text from which a longer version of this story comes, the story is told within the piece entitled The Symposium, it is told by one of the characters placed within it by Plato, the comedy playwright, Aristophanes. Written as a conversation between several real people contemporary to the real Plato like Aristophanes at a party of the Athenian elite, I think Aristophanes’ is made to tell the story with one eye on being considered deliberately provocative and playful.
And, though told to illustrate how love came to have such power because of the soulmates involved in driving it towards each other’s union in life and their means of them becoming soulmates, it starts off requiring us to belive a theory of sex/gender that is absolutely crucial to the explanation. That is because, if soulmates exist, it was necessary in Ancient Greece to explain why for some men and women, soulmates were of the same sex/gender and yet for some others they were not. If you have not read the story, here it is – if cut down in length at the opening g and closing.
I will try to describe his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you. In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word ‘Androgynous’ is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: ‘Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.’ He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them,—being the sections of entire men or women,—and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position, and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature. Some indeed assert that they are shameless, but this is not true; for they do not act thus from any want of shame, but because they are valiant and manly, and have a manly countenance, and they embrace that which is like them. And these when they grow up become our statesmen, and these only, which is a great proof of the truth of what I am saving. When they reach manhood they are lovers of youth, and are not naturally inclined to marry or beget children,—if at all, they do so only in obedience to the law; but they are satisfied if they may be allowed to live with one another unwedded; and such a nature is prone to love and ready to return love, always embracing that which is akin to him. And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, ‘What do you people want of one another?’ they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: ‘Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?’—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need (compare Arist. Pol.). And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.
This is without a doubt intended to be a funny story from a funny man, particularly in the description of the primal man, the origin of queer male soulmate lovers, such as, as mentioned earlier in The Symposium, Achilles and Patroclus. It will be put in a bad light by Socrates when he describes that his love of Alcibiades, is not physical at all (no tumbling and rolling to of these soulmate parts here then, reconnecting the ‘two privy members’ of the ‘One’ primal man Aristophanes would argue they had been were they actually in Love, but a state of chaste desire and aspiration to mutual betterment, what would become called ‘Platonic Love’.
It is not just that Plato does not propose the idea as Bishop describes it, but that the form of the work ridicules that story of Aristophanes invented by Plato, for that purpose no doubt. That may be because Aristophanes ridiculed many of the men at this fictional party, especially Agathon, whom he ridiculed as an overly feminine man who desired other men sexually, for being overloaded with pretension to be identified with women and dressing as females. The whole point of Aristophanes story is that male lovers of males are both men, even if, for a time, they prefer young pre-masculine (before they were bearded) boys.
Plato certainly agreed that soulmates could describe couples regardless of their heterosexuality or otherwise, but I think Socrates makes it clear that becoming soulmates was a matter of conscious agency of the lovers involved, in shaping their desires for instance to divine ends, not bodily ones. Even with bodily sex, the same applies for all lovers of all types.
This is why Bishop is right, whatever errors she has about Plato, about the soulmate as an invention of Romanticism, although I would date it to eighteenth century Germany, though not without the English word ‘soulmate’ at its focal point.
But although the concept of a soulmate might have existed for thousands of years, the actual term was probably only introduced in the 19th Century. Its first recorded use is in 1822, in a letter written by poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “To be happy in Married Life… you must have a Soul-mate,” he wrote. Coleridge’s own love life was unhappy – he married mostly due to social pressures and spent most of the union apart from his wife, before they eventually separated for good.
Bishop from then on gets the history and social theory of the soulmate placed where it needs to be in something version of social psychology and psychosocial individual development. First too many people, even whilst believing in soulmates choose partners from a common locality and sociocultural group:
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about the idea of a perfect person being predestined for you. After all, most people don’t stray far when finding their partner, with the majority of Americans marrying someone from the same state as them, and 43% marrying someone who they went to high school or college with.
She then produces the psychosocial.underpinning from an associate professor at Skidmore Colege. USA:
Bradley Onishi … believes that there is something innate in our desire to believe in soulmates.
“The soulmate myth promises fulfilment,” says Onishi. “It says that the isolation and loneliness that are so often part of the human experience are only temporary – that someday there will be a happily ever after in which we are united with The One who understands us at every level, protects us from harm and gives our life overwhelming significance.”
He points out that, for many of us, believing in a soulmate is a way of constructing a cohesive narrative from the oftentimes chaotic and unpredictable experience of looking for love. “The soulmate myth is really good at taking all the bad first dates, the breakups, the dashed hopes and disappointments and putting them into a story that says ‘someday all of this will fall into place’,” he says.
It is also important to show that expectations and retrospective beliefs about perfected soulmate unions are deeply impractical precisely for the reason that makes them seem desirable, in a world where grand narratives are failing us and we feel fragmented. To know that soulmates are co-produced not pre-existent entities waiting for union or reunion is a recipe for working at our relationships, and abandoning ones we dare not admit to be faulty and dangerous. Here is Bishop on the matter again:
On the other hand, soulmate sceptics tend to have a ‘growth’ mindset. They believe that relationships take work and compromise, and are motivated to find solutions to problems.
“An expectation that something will be instantly and everlastingly perfect only leads to disappointment and resentment, because this simply isn’t realistic,” says Ruth Micallef, a specialist BACP-registered counsellor who works with many patients experiencing relationship struggles. “Some of the most successful relationships are couples who have spent years supporting each other through all of the personal changes that they are going through, and never expect each other to be ‘perfect’ or ‘everything’.”
“None of us is perfect – not you, and not your future mate,” says Wilcox. “So, focus on the non-negotiables – the virtues that will sustain a good marriage, shared values and some common interests. But don’t expect to check every box in a future spouse, unless you wish to be a permanent bachelor or bachelorette.”
But the sexist and heteronormative terminology of the relationship counsellor, especially bachelorette, needs correction too. Within relationships sex/gender struggles are as likely to come to the fore as others. We need to to know that our shared values can change alongside individual ones with the right kind of openness of couples both to each other and even to amicable change of relationship basis, even, in some cases into different chosen family structures.
That’s all.
With love ❤️
Steven xxxxxx.
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[1] Katie Bishop (2022) Why people still believe in soulmates’ (2022) BBC Online (Lovelife) [ 14th February 2022] available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/worklife/article/20220204-why-people-still-believe-in-the-soulmate-myth
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