SOULMATES ARE REAL.

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• published: 18 Nov 2015
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Mysteries of LOVE. Are Soulmates Real? Is Love Real? Click play and after 8 minutes you may have changed your mind. Attribution to Shia for his creative commons license for his "Just Do it Speech" - a great work. All of the studies referenced in this video can be accessed by searching for the title of the article/publication in somewhere such as pubmed.gov or scholar.google.com as all information needed to find them is present within the video. Link to Galantis - Runaway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XR7naZ_zZA I've always been interested in the idea that most of us never meet our soulmate, a soulmate being someone we feel is as close to perfect a match as we'd ever want. This person would like some of the things you like, but have enough of their own interests to keep things fresh. They'd have the kind of career life balance you have. They'd laugh at the right jokes, like the right food, love doing that thing you like with your butt. The idea that one person on the entire planet is absolutely perfect for you, but chances are, with seven billion people, you'll never meet them. Robert Zajonc discovered something called the Mere Exposure effect. It refers to our tendency to like things far more if they are familiar to us. If you're exposed to something often you'll like it more, unless the exposing is being done by your creepy uncle of course. Apparently exposure helps to explain the concept of propinquity, which is the idea that one of the main reasons you become attracted to someone is physical proximity. Yes, there are examples of people becoming infatuated with others over the internet, but isn't that too a kind of proximity? Perhaps it isn't the physical proximity, but the routine, the familiarity of meeting a person over and over again, in whatever way you do this. Physically or metaphysically. In a series of studies by Leon Festinger in 1950 he showed that people who lived near to each other in an apartment complex were more likely to be friends than those who lived even slightly further away, say one door down or something. Also if they passed them more often on the stairs or in the laundry room, they were better friends too. So it suggests that whilst it is random chance which decides those who you meet, who you fall in love with is determined by the company you keep. How often do people daydream about a perfect stranger walking into their lives. It seems that this just doesn't happen. Another theory based on idealization ties into this. This suggests that ideal person is inside you as much as you are inside them. And we're not talking dirty here. Idealization involves you projecting your ideal characteristics on someone, and letting your brain fill in the gaps. If the gaps they fill please you, you fall in love. If not, you move on. We fall in love with the idea of things every day. The idea of your favorite jacket because you imagine it might make you look cool, the idea of a movie given from the trailer because you fill in the gaps and think yeah that’ll be awesome. Our brains fill in gaps all the time to create works of fiction, and guess what, you’re doing it right now. For example, you may think your eyes act like a camera and what they take in is what you see, but that’s not true. Your eyes are used to collect data from the world around you to build up a virtual picture in your brain. The same is true of sounds and any other senses. Your brain paints this virtual picture inside your head to create what we call sight and sound, and these virtual constructs are heavily influenced by our upbringing, our culture, and our experiences. This is why different tribes of people draw different things when asked to show what the perfect partner would physically look like. So if your brain does this all the time when seeing or hearing things, surely this too could occur when you fall in love? This theory does seem to ring true as often during the early stages of infatuation you might underestimate or even idealise someone's negative attributes if they have enough positive ones to sway you. If someone is a jerk, you'll see them as confident. If someone is fat, they’re curvy and at ease with their figure. If someone has no arms or legs, they're easily portable and don't require legroom on long haul flights. So your perfect person is dependent not on some random factor or a chance meeting, but your own personal preferences. So does this mean that if you're unlucky in love doing new things and changing your own personal horizons and interests could change who you are, which in turn alters the ideal partner inside your mind? Possibly. Or maybe just move to a new country, because that sounds fun.