Why do we believe in soulmates? In his book, What If?, American author Randall Munroe asks us to imagine a world where each person was randomly assigned an exclusive partner who would complete them. Imagine a version of ChatRoulette, where people cycle through strangers, locking eyes for a few seconds before moving on—enough time to know if you felt a connection. According to Munroe’s mathematical model, if everyone on earth used the system for eight hours a day, seven days a week, everyone would find their soulmate within a few decades.
This vision of a world with soulmates is bleak, to say the least. No one can spend eight hours a day locking eyes with strangers through a webcam, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be very likely to find their soulmate.
But according to a 2020 YouGov poll, over 60% of US adults believe in the idea of soulmates. So do 59% of my Instagram followers, according to if you ask my Instagram poll. 41% of respondents to the Independent’s sex survey believe they might currently be dating their soulmate, with 25% confidently believing they are. That’s a relatively high proportion of people. But their convictions are is statistically unfounded.
Munroe’s model is missing something key about the idea of a soulmate that may offer an answer. For many, the idea of trying to find your soulmate defeats the purpose entirely. Instead, most believe that you’re meant to run into your soulmate eventually: it’s meant to be. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to put any effort into the soulmate search. Locking yourself in your room and only venturing out to pick up UberEats orders doesn’t seem like the prime strategy for finding your true love. But most would argue that if you make at least some effort, living life normally and amongst others, you’re destined to find your soulmate.
Yet the concept of predestined love remains irrational. In a country where 50% of marriages end in divorce, this belief seems unbearably panglossian, albeit common. Even at Harvard, an institution whose pursuit of rational explanation of the world is immortalized in its motto, a large portion of people continue to believe in a concept that fails to have scientific or, for most, religious justification.
“I think everyone’s bound to meet their soulmate,” says Katerina Nasto ’24. “You’ll meet at some point in your life someone that you’ll probably feel, ‘this person’s my other half.’” As a Neuroscience concentrator, Nasto admits her belief in soulmates cannot be defended by logic or science: “Love isn’t necessarily something you can reason.”
But perhaps this belief in soulmates isn’t as irrational as we think. It is easy to feel demoralized about romance in the Harvard dating scene. With most of our calendars drowning amidst a sea of multicolored commitments, many students exchange a time-intensive relationship search for less emotionally taxing hookups. “For many, building a résumé, not finding a boyfriend (never mind a husband), is their main job on campus,” The New York Times wrote about women’s engagement in college hookup culture. Moreover, the idea of a soulmate offers some solace from responsibility, an encouragement that despite the perpetual stress that hinders our search for true love, if we keep chugging along, the universe will eventually reward us with our second half.
Pragmatists may call this naive. “I don’t believe that there’s one cosmically determined partner for each person, but I do believe that some people fit together really, really well and are near perfectly suited for one another,” one Independent survey respondent said. Another explains that while they believe in soulmates, “I don’t think you only have one option.”
However, even the biggest pragmatists can become romantic fatalists. “I used to be very against the idea that everything happens for a reason,” says Nasto, “but in my life trajectory, it does kind of feel like everything has happened for a reason.”
We believe in soulmates because it offers us a world where our actions no longer have consequences. We don’t have to worry about making the right move, or impressing others, or going out enough. Instead, we know that we’ll meet our soulmate eventually because, well, it’s fate. Paradoxically, the belief in fate, the surrendering of our own free will, seems to offer its own sort of freedom.
What happens when such a belief extends past purely romance? If fate dictates not only your soulmate, but the rest of your life, is there really any motivation for living a moral life? Most systems of morality rely on some sort of punishment-reward system for encouraging good. What is karma, for instance, if any positive or negative experiences you may have are already pre written before your birth?
The belief in fate sacrifices freedom of will for freedom from responsibility. Without the ability to autonomously choose, we are liberated to disregard moral laws. Perhaps this alluring possibility is the source of our irrational belief.
We overestimate humanity’s love for freedom, however. Either we have control over our future, or we’re free to disregard it completely. Yet we somehow fail to embrace either option. Take Calvinism. The doctrine of predestination, where God has already decided whether to save or damn each individual before any actions they ever take, does not result in a moral free for all. Instead, Calvinists continue attempting to live moral lives, purely out of their own choosing, despite the fact that deep down, they know their actions are inconsequential.
“Man has no greater anxiety in life than to find someone to whom he can make over that gift of freedom with which the unfortunate creature is born,” declares the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. We refuse to embrace any type of freedom, both of action or consequence. Instead, we nestle ourselves in the middle, comforting ourselves with fate, but all the while willfully tricking ourselves into believing in our own free will.
Humanity is like an intermediate rock climber. We hesitate from going full Alex Honnold, and embracing the true freedom of free soloing. However, we’re also too prideful to rely on protective gear to assist our climbing, despite the risks we would then be free to take. Instead, we take the free climbing route, where we use the bare minimum amount of climbing equipment to save our lives in case we slip. It’s a mistake to see our belief in soulmates as a belayer, encouraging us through every romantic interaction we have. Instead, soulmates are a singular rope, only used in those desperate times of our relationships when we slip and fall.
Our beliefs are seemingly self-contradictory. We believe in karma, but also fate. We have a free will, but everything is still meant to be. We willfully lie to ourselves in order to avoid responsibility, shirking freedom at every corner despite our full throated endorsement of it. We are paradoxical creatures by our very nature, and most of our beliefs will never make sense. I don’t believe in soulmates. Personally, to me, only being able to be truly happy with one person seems like a less than ideal life. However, as Tim Minchin put it in his song “If I Didn’t Have You”:
Our love is one in a million,
you couldn’t buy it at any price.
But of the nine point nine nine nine hundred thousand other possible loves,
Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.
Manuel Yepes ’24 (mannyyepes@college.harvard.edu) is looking for his own soulmate.