Do Soulmates Exist? Is There Really Just One?
Entry No. 149 ·
By The IF Team
Do soulmates exist? Not in the sense of one person made for you, waiting somewhere to be found: there is no evidence for that, and plenty of people find deep, lasting love more than once in a lifetime. In the sense most happy couples mean when they use the word — someone who knows you so well, and whom you know so well, that the bond feels meant to be — soulmates are real, but they tend to be made rather than found. And research suggests that how you believe in soulmates matters more than whether you do.
If you believe in them, you are in the majority: in a 2011 poll, nearly three in four Americans said they believe in soulmates. And if you are reading this because one particular person feels like yours, whatever your circumstances or theirs, that feeling deserves to be taken seriously. It is the feeling IF was built for: a way for anyone, single or partnered and whoever they love, to say honestly what they feel for someone they already know, and to keep it until life lets them act on it.
Where the idea of a soulmate comes from
The longing is ancient. In Plato’s Symposium, written in Athens around 2,400 years ago, the comic playwright Aristophanes tells a myth in which the first humans were round, doubled creatures — some made of two men, some of two women, some of a man and a woman — until Zeus split them in half. Ever since, the story goes, each of us has been searching for our other half. The image has never gone away. Spanish speakers call a perfect partner their media naranja, their half orange; in Yiddish, the person you are destined to marry is your bashert.
The word itself is younger. Merriam-Webster traces the earliest known use of ‘soul mate’ to an 1822 letter by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who told a young woman that a happy marriage needs a soul-mate as well as a house-mate. Two centuries on, the idea has soaked up a good deal of Hollywood: one person, one meeting, a lifetime of certainty.
Other traditions picture it differently. In Chinese and Japanese folklore, an invisible red string of fate ties together two people destined to meet, however long it takes. The Korean idea of in-yun is gentler still: ties built up in layers across many lifetimes, which can run deep without ever ending in marriage. Like the five love languages, each is a way of explaining why some connections feel unlike any other.
Destiny or growth: the belief that shapes how you love
The most useful research on soulmates is not about whether they exist, but about what believing in them does. In the late 1990s, the psychologist C. Raymond Knee described two sets of beliefs about relationships. Destiny beliefs hold that two people are either meant for each other or not, and that you can tell fairly early. Growth beliefs hold that relationships are built: that problems can be worked through, and that working through them is part of how love grows. The two are not opposites, and plenty of people hold a little of each.
In Knee’s studies, the beliefs showed up in behaviour. People high in destiny belief leaned heavily on first impressions: relationships that began well tended to last, but when one began badly, it was more likely to end. People high in growth belief were more inclined to meet problems by working on them. Neither is foolish. But the destiny frame puts enormous weight on the early weeks, when everyone is nervous and nobody is at their best.
Research by the psychologist Renae Franiuk and her colleagues found a similar split between what they called soulmate and work-it-out theories of love. For people with a soulmate theory, satisfaction hinged more tightly on whether their partner seemed ideal, which works beautifully while they do, and less well on the day they forget your birthday.
Even a passing frame can matter. In one set of experiments, people nudged to think of love as two halves made for each other felt worse about their relationship after recalling a conflict than people nudged to think of it as a journey. Halves either fit or they do not. Journeys have hills.
So is there only one?
Almost certainly not. If there were one perfect person for each of us, most people would never meet theirs: they would be on the wrong continent, born in the wrong decade, or sitting two carriages down on the wrong train. That so many people meet someone they love in their own city, through friends, at work or on an app suggests that the right fit is far more common than the one-and-only story allows. People who lose a partner, or part from one, very often love deeply again.
That is good news, not a cheapening of love. It means the person you choose matters because you keep choosing them, not because some cosmic computer chose them for you. It also means that if one connection does not work out, it was not your only chance.
And yet the feeling of having met ‘the one’ is not nothing. It usually describes something real: ease, being known, a sense that you are more yourself with them than without them. Those are worth noticing. They are just not proof of destiny, and they can grow with more than one person.
What people really mean by ‘my soulmate’
If you are wondering whether someone is your soulmate, a more useful question is whether the connection has the qualities that soulmate stories are really about:
- You can be ordinary around them — tired, silly, wrong — and still feel liked.
- Talk is easy in both directions, and so is silence.
- You trust them with things you have told very few people.
- You both want the other to grow, even in directions neither of you planned.
- Disagreements end with you closer, or at least no further apart.
None of these arrives on the first night. They are built, which is the growth view in a sentence. They can also grow out of a friendship, which is why friendship is such a common first chapter for couples: how many couples start as friends looks at the numbers.
When your soulmate is with someone else
The hardest version of the question is the one many people are really asking: what if the person who feels like your soulmate is in a relationship, or you are? The feeling is not wrong, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. Connections do not check anyone’s relationship status before they happen. What would be wrong is cheating or lying, and both are lines worth holding however strong the pull.
Within those lines, you have honest choices. You can let the feeling be, without acting on it. You can tell them, which is brave, though it carries real risk: it lands in the middle of a life they have built, and it cannot be unsaid. Or you can say it in a way that asks nothing of them today. Right person, wrong time looks at how to tell timing from a gentle no, and how to wait without putting your life on hold.
Where IF fits: for the one who arrived at the wrong time
If soulmates are made rather than found, timing matters as much as fate, and timing is what IF is for. It lets anyone tell the person they care about how they truly feel — whether either of them is attached or not, and whoever that person is — then holds the feeling, sealed, until the moment both of them can act on it.
Two singles on IF send a Like, and an accepted Like opens a chat. When a relationship is in the way, on your side or theirs, or they have not signed up yet, what you send is an IF: a sealed message, no longer than 250 characters, meant for them alone. Look for them in Swipe, or search for them with something they chose to give you — an email, a number, an Instagram handle. However strong the pull, nothing opens on IF while either of you is in a relationship: no Like, no match, no chat. An IF never asks anyone to cheat, or to hide anything from anyone.
It stays sealed, unless they delete it, until you are both single. Then it reveals in one of two ways. If you were already single when their status changes to single, a 24-hour window opens for you to reveal it, or you can let it lapse for good. If they were already single and the relationship was yours, it reveals as soon as you change your status to single. They see your name and your words, and the choice is theirs; if they say yes, the two of you can finally talk, starting from what you wrote.
In the meantime, they may get word that an IF is waiting, but not whose it is or what it holds. Someone who has not joined gets one brief invitation if you used their email address; an IF to a number or handle stays put, unsent, in case they arrive. Sending your first IF costs nothing.
Questions people ask
Can you have more than one soulmate?
If a soulmate means someone with whom you share a rare, deep understanding, then yes, and many people do over a lifetime: a partner, a best friend, the person they loved at twenty-two and the one they love now. The idea of exactly one is a story, not a finding.
What is a twin flame?
A twin flame is a newer spiritual idea, popular online: that one soul is split between two bodies, which are drawn together with great intensity, often through cycles of separation and reunion. Like the soulmate, it has no research behind it. Intensity can feel like fate, but steadiness is a better sign that something is good for you.
Is it bad to believe in soulmates?
Not in itself. Believing someone is right for you can be a source of warmth and commitment. The trouble comes when the belief makes every rough patch look like proof you chose wrong. Holding both views at once — right for each other, and still worth working on — seems to give you the best of each.
How do you know if someone is your soulmate?
There is no sign, and you do not need one. Look at what the bond does: whether you are more yourself with them, whether it holds up on ordinary days, and whether it keeps growing. If you are still wondering whether a new feeling is love at all, whether love at first sight is real is a good place to start.
Soulmates may be made rather than found, but sometimes you find the person long before you can make anything together. If that is where you are, say it in an IF, sealed, and give the timing a chance to catch up with the feeling.