{"id":16490,"date":"2019-05-17T02:01:05","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T02:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=16490"},"modified":"2019-05-18T05:59:05","modified_gmt":"2019-05-18T05:59:05","slug":"whats-behind-the-belief-in-a-soulmate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/whats-behind-the-belief-in-a-soulmate\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s behind the belief in a soulmate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bradley Onishi<\/a>, Skidmore College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The United States appears to be in a romantic slump. Marriage rates have plummeted<\/a> over the last decade. And compared to previous generations, young single people today are perhaps spending more time on social media than actual dating<\/a>. They are also having less sex<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite these trends, a yearning for a soulmate remains a common thread across the generations. Most Americans, it seems, are still looking for one. According to a 2017 poll<\/a> two-thirds of Americans believe in soulmates. That number far surpasses the percentage of Americans who believe in the biblical God<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The idea that there is a person out there who can make each of us happy and whole is constantly conveyed through portrayals in films,<\/a> books,<\/a> magazines<\/a> and television<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What accounts for the persistence of the soulmate ideal in the contemporary age?<\/p>\n

Origins of the soulmate myth<\/h2>\n

Ten years ago, after a hard breakup, I decided to investigate. As a scholar of religion and culture<\/a> who was trained in the history of ideas, I was interested in connecting the various iterations of the soulmate ideal through time.<\/p>\n

One early use of the word \u201csoulmate\u201d<\/a> comes from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a letter from 1822<\/a>: \u201cTo be happy in Married Life \u2026 you must have a Soul-mate.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Coleridge, a successful marriage needed to be about more than economic or social compatibility. It required a spiritual connection.<\/p>\n

Several centuries prior to Coleridge, the Greek philosopher Plato, in his text \u201cSymposium,\u201d wrote about the reasons behind the human yearning for a soulmate. Plato quotes the poet Aristophanes as saying<\/a> that all humans were once united with their other half, but Zeus split them apart out of fear and jealousy. Aristophanes explains<\/a> the transcendent experience of two soulmates reuniting in the following way:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself \u2026 the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other\u2019s sight, as I may say, even for a moment.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The religious sources<\/h2>\n

These references aren\u2019t limited to Coleridge and Plato. In numerous religious traditions, the human soul\u2019s connection to God has been envisioned in similar ways. While the examples from religious traditions are numerous, I will mention just two from Judaism and Christianity.<\/p>\n

At different points in the history of these these two faith traditions, mystics and theologians employed erotic and marital metaphors to understand their relationships with God. Despite important differences, they both envision amorous union with the one divine force as the pathway to true selfhood, happiness and wholeness.<\/p>\n

This idea is expressed in the Hebrew Bible, where God is consistently seen as the one to whom his chosen people, Israel, are betrothed. \u201cFor your Maker is your husband,\u201d a passage in the Hebrew Bible<\/a> says. Israel \u2013 the ancient kingdom, not the modern nation-state \u2013 plays the role of God\u2019s spouse.<\/p>\n

Throughout Israelite history this idea frames the relationship between the people of Israel and God, whom they know as Yahweh. When Yahweh ratifies his covenant with Israel, his chosen people, he is often referred to as Israel\u2019s husband. In turn, Israel is envisioned as Yahweh\u2019s wife. For the Israelites, the divine one<\/a> is also their romantic soulmate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is illustrated in the Song of Songs, an erotic love poem<\/a> with a female narrator. The Song of Songs is written from the perspective of a woman longing to be with her male lover. It\u2019s filled with vivid physical descriptions of the two characters and the delights they take in each other\u2019s bodies.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour channel is an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits,\u201d the narrator recounts her man saying to her, before proclaiming that her garden is \u201ca fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams from Lebanon<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Song of Songs is not only an unquestioned part of Jewish and Christian scripture, it\u2019s been understood for millennia by Jewish sages as the key to understanding the most important events in Israelite history.<\/p>\n

Erotic mysticism<\/h2>\n

By the second century A.D., Christians too began framing their relationship with the divine in erotic terms through the Song of Songs.<\/p>\n

One of the first, and most influential, was Origen of Alexandria<\/a>, a second-century mystic who became the first great Christian theologian. According to him<\/a>, the Song is the key to understanding the soul\u2019s relationship to Christ.<\/p>\n

Origen calls it an \u201cepithalamium,\u201d which is a poem written for a bride on the way to the bridal chamber. For him, the Song is \u201ca drama and sang under the figure of the Bride,\u201d who is about to wed her groom, \u201cthe Word of God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Origen views Jesus as his divine soulmate. He anticipates the end of time when his soul will \u201ccleave\u201d to Christ, so that he will never be apart from him again \u2013 and he does this by using erotic terms.<\/p>\n

His writings on the Song founded a rich and expansive tradition of Christian mystical texts<\/a> based on the soul\u2019s erotic and marital union with Christ.<\/p>\n

The power of the myth<\/h2>\n

By tracing the soulmate ideal to these religious sources it\u2019s possible to gain fresh perspective on its power and function in an age when more Americans identify as having no religious affiliation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The soulmate myth informs the reality show \u201cThe Bachelor,\u201d where young women wait for the attention of one chosen \u201cbachelor\u201d in hopes of finding true love. It is the same in the film adaptation of Nicholas Spark\u2019s novel \u201cThe Notebook,\u201d which follows the path of two lovers separated at various times by war, family and illness.<\/p>\n

And then there are the Tinder users \u2013 wading through an excess of possible romantic partners, perhaps hoping that their one and only will eventually make them whole and happy.<\/p>\n

In light of the myth\u2019s history, it\u2019s not surprising that even at a time when fewer Americans may be turning to God, they are still looking for their one true soulmate.\"The<\/p>\n

Bradley Onishi<\/a>, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Skidmore College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bradley Onishi, Skidmore College The United States appears to be in a romantic slump. Marriage rates have plummeted over the last decade. And compared to previous generations, young single people today are perhaps spending more time on social media than actual dating. They are also having less sex. Despite these trends, a yearning for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":16489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2450],"tags":[3647,1961,1937,3646,2850,5482,459,5877,314,1959],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16490"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16490"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16492,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16490\/revisions\/16492"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}