Soul Mates - is it bunkum?

Fraggle

I find myself wondering a lot about the idea of soul mates. ie. a partner or a friend that you have a one-off bond with. The cynic in me says, look at all the friends who let you down, the way people fall in love on numerous occasions in their lives....maybe I've answered my own question here!I don't like to be a cynic. Any more viewpoints on this that might cause me to be more open minded?

simu

Hmm... think this might get more of a response in Psychology - moved.

Eoghan-psych

Fraggle wrote:

I find myself wondering a lot about the idea of soul mates. ie. a partner or a friend that you have a one-off bond with. The cynic in me says, look at all the friends who let you down, the way people fall in love on numerous occasions in their lives....maybe I've answered my own question here!I don't like to be a cynic. Any more viewpoints on this that might cause me to be more open minded?

My first response to such an area would be "right, first show me some souls, *then* start talking about what they do". When the inevitable happens and no such thing is done, I ask for a better term so that it can be looked at sensibly.

The notion seems to rest on this "only one" idea, which strikes me as absurd.

We are a genetic match for a very very large proportion of our species. Controlling for all of the various natural biases affecting choice of mate [we tend to go for people who are biologically similar, of a peer group, etc etc - yes I know there are exceptions] that still leaves a phenomenally large portion with which we could mate/pair bond/fall in love with/insert appropriate term.

If there was only one suitable match for each person, think of the odds of people forming long term, stable partnerships - it would mean people have at best a 1 in 5-6 billion chance of actually finding someon.

With several billion people on the planet, the vast majority of whom will never meet [for most of the 4 million population in Ireland, the world's population may as well be 4 million], coupled to the numbers of people who do actually get married or form long term relationships, I find it a statistical impossibility that there is really just one match for each person.

I think the notion that evolution has conferred us with *one* suitable mate to be something of an absurdity.
Eoghanm

Fraggle

Thanks Eoghanm.Thats what I was thinking.Had just been pondering over the philosophical meaning behind all of that soulmate jazz and somebody moved my thread into this forum. Guess that means I got a more blunt opinion than I was expecting.

As a female in late 20's I am growing aweary of this 'I know he is the only man for me' bullsh** from the mouths of friends when I know this makes no sense statistically.

Had not expected to be moved to the psyschology forum btw.Thanks for the feedback!

Ickle Magoo

I don't think there is one person "out there" for us either - I think that once you find someone you like enough, you stop looking at other people and so they become the only person for us......I don't think you can truly claim to have found your soul mate unless you genuinely searched all your life and never found anyone else - but most people find someone they fall in love with and as they take the time & effort to get to know that person inside out & stop looking at other people, they turn their mate into their soul mate rather than that person being born to spend their life with you.....IMO

Samos

Ickle Magoo wrote:

I think that once you find someone you like enough, you stop looking at other people and so they become the only person for us......

yes. You don't find your soul-mate. You create him/her, when you find someone with whom a mutual bond can be found and sustained.