Ah, Valentine's Day – that glittering commercialised shrine to human delusion where we persuade ourselves that, amid the teeming billions of inadequates, there lurks a single flawless specimen destined to mend the unpatchable rents in our souls. Plato started the rot, of course, with his fanciful yarn about Zeus bisecting us like overripe melons because we were getting above ourselves. Ever since, we've been stumbling about, four-limbed and half-witted, in search of the missing piece that will finally make us whole.
A touching thought, if you can overlook the implication that we're all, by divine decree, incomplete wrecks. History, never slow to pile on the misery, refined the torment. Medieval troubadours turned it into courtly love – knights mooning over unattainable ladies, proving their devotion through exquisite self-denial. Lancelot and Guinevere: a template for every doomed affair since. Shakespeare added cosmic cruelty with his star-crossed lovers, fated to adore each other while the universe conspires to keep them apart. And then Hollywood arrived, peddling the fairy-tale ending where passion conquers all, provided the lighting is soft and the soundtrack swells at the right moment. Science, bless its cold, dispassionate heart, has finally weighed in to confirm what any honest observer already suspected: the whole edifice is a house of cards built on wishful thinking.
Take the psychologists. One traces our modern obsession back to those chivalric tales that first insisted we pick one person and stick to them for life – a notion that apparently arrived just as industrialisation was ripping communities apart and leaving individuals lonely, alienated, and desperate for a saviour in human form. Enter dating apps, the apotheosis of relation-shopping: swipe through dozens, hundreds, thousands of profiles until the soul itself goes numb. You're not searching for love; you're auditing inventory. Another academic draws a helpful distinction between the soulmate (pre-fabricated, effortless, handed down by destiny) and the "one and only" (something two people cobble together through years of adaptation, apology, and occasional dental damage). The soulmate fantasy, he warns, is a trap. Believe in it, and the first serious row prompts the inevitable thought: if this were meant to be, it wouldn't hurt so much. Better to bail out and resume the search for the real thing – which, naturally, doesn't exist.
Then there are the love coaches who point out that the electric "spark" so often mistaken for destiny is frequently just trauma in a party dress. That intoxicating push-pull, the hot-and-cold routine that keeps you hooked? Your nervous system recognising a familiar wound and gamely trying to reopen it. The strongest attachments, apparently, form not with consistent partners but with those who alternate charm and cruelty – a pattern with a pedigree going back to abusive relationships studied decades ago. What feels like fate is often just the echo of an old injury, dressed up as romance. Biology chimes in with its own dampener: hormonal contraceptives can subtly rewrite attraction, flattening the natural cycles that once guided mate choice. Change the pill, change the feeling; suddenly the person who once seemed perfect looks merely tolerable. If chemistry can be so easily meddled with by pharmacology, the idea of a single pre-ordained match begins to look decidedly shaky.
Mathematicians, never ones to miss an opportunity to crush hope, have run the numbers. Their algorithms reveal not one soulmate but many viable candidates – second-order, third-order, fourth-order – all perfectly adequate provided neither party can do better. Comforting, isn't it? Plenty of fish in the sea, each marginally less disappointing than the last. And what sustains the rare couples who endure? Not grand gestures or cinematic passion, but the small, grinding kindnesses: a cup of tea in bed, a warmed car on a winter morning, wildflowers jammed in a jam jar. The mundane choreography of shared life, performed daily amid money worries, family demands, and the quiet management of each other's frailties. It turns out the most "soulful" relationships are not those that feel fated but those that survive the realisation that they aren't.
So there we have it, courtesy of science: soulmates are a mirage, love is maintenance work, and the happiest endings are the ones that haven't ended yet – usually because both parties have run out of energy to leave. Happy Valentine's Day. May your illusions hold just long enough to get you through your poncy, overpriced dinner this year.