If you’re typing “have I already met my soulmate?” into Google, the chances are you’re in a similarly ambiguous emotional place to the one I found myself in six years ago. Had I messed up my sole chance at passionate romantic happiness with “the one that got away”? Would I die alone, rueing that missed opportunity? Or should I settle for a more companionable partnership and a sense of family?
In reality I was, and had always been, surrounded by multiple potential soulmates. Yet it took the grand adventure of touring a comedy show and writing a book for me to get myself to a place of sufficient clarity to open my eyes and see them. A few sessions with a fantastic therapist helped too. The question that I should have been asking all along was: “have I sorted out enough of my shit to be able to receive a soulmate?”
The unhelpful notion that we must seek out our other half in order to complete ourselves dates back to Greek mythology and Zeus splitting four-legged two-headed humans in two. Now, as we live much longer and technology has opened up access to so many dating options, many serial monogamists find that there is a different soulmate for each stage of life. Some people are finding that simultaneous, ethical, polyamorous relationships work for them, too. And let’s not forget, as it is so easy to do in this sex-obsessed world, that platonic pals can be soulmates too. Some people are asexual and may prefer a sort of love affair friendship scenario.
When I met my aforementioned one that got away, I had just embarked on the unpredictable whirlwind of a career in comedy. I was starting to do quite well. It was all rather thrilling. However, I had been hoodwinked by my own excitement. My friend Qazi Rahman, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, thinks that “the early high you get from being in the beginnings of a relationship can drive decisions that are not optimal. And being on a high in life in general can drive us into relationships that are not optimal in the first place.” I hurtled into a relationship with someone who I presumed to be the one, without applying any sort of robust filtering or rational thought processes whatsoever.
Beginning a relationship when we are in a heartbroken low doesn’t tend to work either. In the book The Chemistry Between Us, Larry Young and Brian Alexander discuss an urgent, primal drive to trigger oxytocin release and relieve stress after a separation, often leading us rapidly towards new sexual pairings or rebound relationships. However, the brain cocktail is very different to the heady one we experience after a healthy break.
I was ultimately astounded to meet my amazing new partner online. I had always been an advocate of the random, organic nature of meeting in real life. I was never convinced that an algorithm could allow for the nuances of human attraction. Qazi says: “the maths is based on a principle of like attracts like … but some of the interests and qualities being measured boil down to pretty mundane things.” As it happens, my partner and I match fairly poorly on shared tastes in films and music. I’m a snob. She’s into the mainstream. But it’s in our murkier, deeper emotional workings where we have real common ground. We both lost a parent during our 20s, a lonely experience we couldn’t share with many peers. We don’t sit around and talk about it. In fact, our relationship is largely filled with laughter and playfulness. But the reassuring certainty that my partner empathises with such a key traumatic lifetime event makes her feel somehow like she is right for me. A year in, we moved in together and haven’t looked back.
Still, romantic life has its ups and downs. Even a fairytale soulmate can temporarily seem like a pain in the arse when they have just eaten the last biscuit. Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight is one of the few films to showcase the petty domestic squabbles, squashed dreams and compromises that follow on from even the most star-crossed beginnings. The final part of his naturalistic trilogy starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy closes with the couple, nine years into their relationship, at an outdoor restaurant in Greece. She muses on how their romantic fantasies will never be matched by the imperfection of reality. As Alain de Botton says: “We seem to know far too much about how love starts and recklessly little about how it might continue.”
Surely, then, the act of acquiring a soulmate lies in the act of positively choosing “this one”, for better and, occasionally, for worse.
• Rosie Wilby is a comedian, author of Is Monogamy Dead? and host of The Breakup Monologues podcast
