Soul Mates

Aristophanes' myth in Plato's Symposium

The idea most often named as an ancestor of the soulmate is a speech by the comic poet Aristophanes in Plato's dialogue Symposium. In the Fowler translation read for this draft, Aristophanes says humans were originally of three kinds, descended from a male, a female and a combined male-female stock, and that each person is now a section looking for the matching section. He applies this to pairings of men with men, women with women and men with women. A scholar of religion adds that, in this myth, Zeus split the original beings out of fear and jealousy.

In the speech, two halves who meet are thrilled with affection and intimacy and love, yet cannot say what they want from each other. Aristophanes imagines the god Hephaestus offering to fuse a pair into one being, and suggests that no one would refuse. Later in the dialogue, Diotima, whose teaching Socrates reports, says that people cherish their own halves only if these are good, and treats love as the desire to possess the good. The sources reviewed do not present the myth as a doctrine of destiny, so it should not be equated with later soulmate belief.

Jewish sources on a predestined mate

A rabbi's essay for Yeshiva University reports that the Talmud (Sotah 2a) records a statement that forty days before a child is formed, a heavenly voice announces whom that child will marry. The Talmud sets this beside the view that a man receives a wife according to his merits, and reconciles them by assigning the first mate to heaven and the second to a person's own deeds. The essay reports that medieval authorities differed: Maimonides rejected a predetermined marriage, the Meiri and the Chasam Sofer limited its scope, and most of the early medieval authorities accepted a single predetermined partner. It also mentions a kabbalistic idea, drawn from the Arizal, of two souls joined before birth.

The English word and the Romantic period

A scholar of religious studies writes that the English word first appears in a letter by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1822, advising that a happy married life required a soul-mate. The essay reads this as a call for spiritual connection beyond economic or social compatibility. It adds that mystics in Jewish and Christian traditions used erotic and marital imagery for relations with God, and names Origen's reading of the Song of Songs as an early and influential case.

Historians describe romantic love as recent in name. Barclay and Holloway report that the term did not gain currency for a distinct kind of love until the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and that scholars disagree on whether romantic love is a medieval invention, a product of Romanticism or something older. They note one account of a path in the West from early modern domesticity to a union of souls in the eighteenth century and then to companionate love. The sources reviewed do not trace when New Age writers adopted the soulmate idea.

Soulmate and related terms

The sources reviewed spell the word soulmate, soul mate and soul-mate. A 2021 study of an online New Age group let respondents define the term themselves and reports that these relationships overlap with romantic love but also include friendships, family relations and relations with animals. In the psychology literature, similar ideas appear as lay theories: one research team contrasts a soulmate theory with a work-it-out theory, and others write of destiny beliefs, in which a satisfying relationship depends on finding a compatible partner, versus growth beliefs, in which it depends on effort.

Implicit theories of relationships, in the review by Knee and colleagues, are the belief component of a larger set of motivations and goals that influence how far people orient toward evaluating or cultivating a relationship. The sources reviewed do not define terms used in some spiritual communities, such as soul family or karmic partner, so this page does not define them.

Confusable ideas

Several nearby ideas differ from the soulmate idea. Romantic love, according to historians, is an elastic term applied across times and places to quite different relationships. The Hebrew and Yiddish word bashert, as discussed in the rabbinic essay above, refers to a mate determined in heaven, with different weight in different rabbinic opinions. In philosophy, union views of love describe love as forming a significant kind of union, a we, without claiming that the partner was destined.

Research on romantic love myths treats the belief in a soulmate as one item cluster among others. In a love-attitudes questionnaire used in an Ecuadorian study, a sample item reads that the respondent and partner were meant for each other. Pages on this site on Past Life Regression, Astrology and Tarot Reading cover practices that some people combine with the idea.

In spiritual communities

Soulmate mythologies exist in many traditions and are popular in contemporary spiritual communities and New Age literature, according to a 2021 study. That study analyzed 140 responses from a convenience sample collected by observing a New Age Facebook group. Respondents reported instant recognition and immediate bonding, along with synchronicities, telepathy, peak experiences, kundalini awakening, dark nights of the soul, psychological transformation and the merging of opposite archetypes. These are self-reports from adherents. The author interpreted them through transpersonal psychology, drawing on Stanislav Grof's work on spiritual emergency, and the study did not test whether the experiences reflect what respondents believe about them.

In readings and counseling

The sources reviewed do not describe how practitioners use the soulmate idea in sessions, and no verified account of session formats, tools or fees was found. Pages on this site on Astrology, Tarot Reading, Past Life Regression and Energy Healing describe those practices separately, and the sources reviewed did not examine how they treat questions of a destined partner. In Jewish dating contexts, a rabbi who counsels on marriage reports that some individuals feel pressure to find their bashert.

What adherents say the idea explains

Respondents in the New Age group study describe soulmate relationships as marked by instant recognition, meaningful coincidence and personal transformation, and some describe them as difficult or disorienting. In the Symposium, Aristophanes offers the myth as an account of why lovers long for each other and cannot say what they want, and as an explanation of love as the desire and pursuit of the whole. Within the rabbinic sources, a predetermined mate is described as an expression of divine providence over marriage.

Popular and cultural uses

A religious studies scholar notes that the soulmate idea appears widely in popular entertainment and dating culture and persists even as religious affiliation declines. The sources reviewed do not report how often people hold the belief, because the one survey figure found was cited without the name of the polling organization or its methods and is therefore not reproduced here. They also do not show that holding the belief leads to any particular outcome in a person's own life.

Studies of destiny and growth beliefs

Franiuk and colleagues ran two studies in which participants were induced to hold either a soulmate or a work-it-out theory. Feelings that the partner was ideal were linked to satisfaction more strongly under the soulmate theory. When beliefs about the relationship were threatened, the soulmate theory produced more relationship-enhancing thoughts if participants believed they were with the right person, and more relationship-detracting thoughts if they did not. The work-it-out theory produced almost no biased processing. The abstract does not report sample sizes or follow-up, and the studies were short-term.

Later work gives a mixed picture. In six studies of sexual beliefs with 1,896 participants, sexual growth beliefs were linked to higher relationship and sexual satisfaction, while the effects of sexual destiny beliefs depended on signs of partner compatibility. In an online survey of 300 Chinese young adults in romantic relationships, growth beliefs were positively associated with satisfaction and destiny beliefs were not significantly associated with it. A separate paper on beliefs that passion decay is irreversible reports effects independent of destiny and growth theories.

Studies of romantic love myths

In a cross-sectional study of 225 women in Ecuador, pregnant adolescents endorsed beliefs related to the soulmate myth more than non-pregnant adolescents. The sample was not random, came largely from one public hospital and cannot show cause. In a survey of 386 young Peruvians in relationships, unrealistic beliefs about love and idealized expectations were associated with more negative interactions and lower satisfaction. These studies used the broader category of romantic love myths, not soulmate belief alone.

What has not been tested

No controlled study of soulmate-focused readings, counseling or similar sessions was found. PubMed searches for soulmate beliefs, for the word soulmate in titles and abstracts, and for soulmate with counseling or intervention terms returned only two papers on soulmate beliefs in relationships, those of Franiuk and colleagues and the Ecuadorian study. Other hits concerned unrelated subjects. Claims about past lives, karmic ties or souls matched across lifetimes are metaphysical, and none of the sources reviewed tests them. This page neither supports nor rules them out. Two frequently cited papers were not freely readable and are not summarized.

Destiny beliefs and relationship strain

In the experiments by Franiuk and colleagues, people induced to hold a soulmate theory showed more relationship-detracting thinking when they doubted their partner was the right person, and this tendency grew under threat. Sexual destiny beliefs were linked to lower relationship quality when partners disagreed more. A rabbi writing on bashert warns that preoccupation with the idea can become a debilitating and counterproductive mindset while dating, and that anxiety about whether a person is the one can prevent a healthy relationship from developing.

Romantic ideals, abuse and coercive control

In a survey of 235 French adults, stronger adherence to romantic love was associated with more blame of victims and more exoneration of perpetrators of intimate partner violence, a link accounted for in part by sexist attitudes and domestic violence myths. A systematic review of qualitative studies of dating violence in lower- and middle-income countries reports that myths of romantic love helped maintain and normalize violence, and that help-seeking was limited to informal sources. A European survey analysis found that violence under coercive control was more serious and had wider consequences than other violence. None of these studies measured soulmate belief specifically, and the sources reviewed do not show that it leads people to stay in harmful relationships.

Care boundaries and standards

A belief that a relationship is destined says nothing about whether it is safe. A realist review of advocacy for abused women describes partner abuse as including coercive control, physical, sexual, economic and emotional abuse, and identifies education about abuse, information on rights and resources, referral and risk assessment with safety planning as core elements of advocacy. It cautions that decisions must weigh risks to safety. Anyone who is afraid of a partner can contact local domestic abuse or crisis services and a health professional, and spiritual guidance does not replace this. No professional register, code or training standard specific to soulmate practitioners was found in the sources or searches reviewed.