I don't believe there's "one soulmate" for everyone -- you can have many in a lifetime. If I thought that way, I would have given up a long time ago.

The hyper-idealistic "soul-mate" nonsense aside, I once read an article by a researcher -- a sociologist I think -- who attempted to answer the question, how many people actually get the brass ring, that is, the sort of relationship we all seem to yearn for based on all the love ballads ever written?

He defined this sort of relationship as a "vital marriage", which he defined as "a marriage in which the relationship is the greatest joy of both parties, and which is characterized by little to no conflict." Setting aside for the moment whether such a thing even really exists, what were his findings?

Well it was a small study and he was a bit vague but my take-away is that no matter how you define things like "vital" and "conflict" and "joy", the number of people who have ever (much less sustainably) experienced this appears to be, at best, somewhere in the single digit percentages; more likely, in the low single digits.

Those are sobering numbers.

As to the One True Love thing, you've rightly discerned that any one of us could be highly compatible with at least many thousands of other people, given that there are billions of rough candidates out there. It stands to reason if there was One True Love out there, the vast majority of us would never meet this person; it's a simple matter of odds (unless of course you believe the fantasy that Someone is tipping the scales so that you will find each other). What clearly ends up happening is that most of us meet someone who we decide will suffice, and about half the time that works out well enough that we don't want to go to the trouble of divorcing them.

This comes back to single-digit territory again. If about 50% of people don't divorce, that doesn't mean they're happily married or content. It just means they are holding it together for one reason or another. My guess is that half the marriages that haven't (yet) ended in divorce are deeply distressing to one or both parties and that likely the marriages that are somewhere between highly rationalizeable and truly happy (whatever exactly that is) are probably sub-10% again.

I've always said that marriage doesn't make you happy, it just gives you more of what you've already got coming into it. If you're morose, anxious, fearful or withheld then you're going to tend to become more so. If you're upbeat, relaxed, confident and open then you're going to tend to become more so. So it mostly comes back to the old chestnut, "become the person you want to be with". That is the secret, not finding some hypothetical "unicorn" -- someone who is just what you (think you) want and need.

You are the solar guy, you worship one sun, you need more than one soulmate?

I think we get more than one soulmate. In fact many. Also soulmates are not here specifically for romantic relationships. Some are just here to teach us something that we need to know, then they are gone. Often times they can be tumultuous relationships. Especially because we may not want to hear what they are telling us. That’s just my understanding of soulmates.