Do soulmates even exist?
‘Love activates the same brain areas as cocaine … being intensely in romantic love takes so much attention, it can be hard to keep your life going, let alone have other relationships.’
Professor Arthur Aron
Many folk secretly hope that hiding in the wings is their one and only soulmate. Romantics often spend their lives searching for this very special person and believing that once they find the one they will live happily ever after.
However, among the disbelievers is Doctor Robert Epstein. He took it further and asked himself – can I deliberately manufacture falling in love with a stranger?
Not being a shy, modest chap, Epstein wrote about it Psychology Today. The concept he proposes was that he and a complete stranger (female) would sign a contract in which they would commit to deliberately falling in love with each other. The faux couple’s progress would be assisted and monitored by ‘qualified’ counselors.
His concept was an immediate sensation. And more than one thousand women from all over the world, kindly offered to help the doctor out with his ‘Love Project’.
And the result? As Britain’s Evening Standard gleefully reported in April 2012:
Besieged by offers, the editor of Psychology Today magazine chose a South American beauty to make his soulmate. But despite signing a “love contract”, Dr Epstein will be spending Christmas alone after the object of his affections decided no amount of tuition could make her love him.
Judiciously Doctor Epstein then concluded there had been too much media intrusion to allow his romance to bloom. Given he’d actively sought publicity to launch his ‘Love Project’, I thought it was rather unfair to get narky about excessive exposure. But I guess spending Christmas alone isn’t conducive to one’s well being.
Let’s take a brief diversion into online dating. Attitudes to dating apps are also changing and shifting. After years of swiping on Bumble, Tinder, Hinge, Grindr, Plenty of Fish, Badoo, Zook etc people seeking ‘dates’ are giving up or reducing their interactions.
Fatigue and boredom with wiping, liking, being ghosted or receiving unwanted genitalia photos has softened the market and user numbers are in rapid decline.
Self-reporting app users estimate they’ve been spending about 90 minutes a day or longer seeking their ‘soul mate’ or as others app users put it more realistically – a ‘f**k buddy’. Other app users have reported that shifting from the free version of the apps to the somewhat pricier ‘platinum’ version means they’ll get more responses from the mostly male pool of available ‘dates’. Women in particular have been dropping off the apps at a greater rate. Leaving behind a pool of males to compete for the attention of fewer and fewer women.
As Brady Robards, Australian researcher and Associate Professor of Sociology put it,
‘Some might say the apps turn dating into a kind of marketplace; if one person doesn’t tick all your boxes then you just re-roll the dice, and you’ve got another date lined up … That commodification of intimacy can be a really big problem.’
Getting back to romanticism and soulmates. As many people discover, relationships fail for all sorts of strange reasons. Numerous psychologists believe the way we were raised affects who we choose to fall in love with and our ‘attachment style’. Apparently how we relate to our partners goes right back to the love – or lack of love – we received as children.
The late British Psychoanalyst John Bowlby once stated, ‘A good childhood is the bedrock of a happy life and a bad one just about dooms us to enduring misery.’
It has occurred to me and many other enquiring minds that maybe Bowlby overstated the issue. His theories seem to indicate that finding a soulmate or even someone we can tolerate could well be exceedingly difficult. Nothing new here, Emily Bronte wrote about the perils of finding a soulmate in her famous novel Wuthering Heights – back in the mid 1800’s.
On the other hand, Philosopher Alain de Botton suggests Romantic Love is an ideal that really should be abandoned. He believes the problems we have with finding a soulmate originated with the 1850’s Romantic movement and romantic ideals replaced a much more sensible, realisitc approach to love.
De Botton firmly believes the ideal of romantic love ensures our downfall.
What do you think?
photo : Foggy Pier by Lesley Truffle