Don't Buy the Soulmate Myth --- Romance is not enough to forge a stable and happy marriage

"Taylor Swift's hit song "Lover" is the perfect anthem for this Valentine's Day, especially since she is in the midst of a very public romance with her latest boyfriend, Travis Kelce. "There's a dazzling haze, a mysterious way about you," she sings to her "magnetic force of a man." This gets the start of a love affair just right. But the song's refrain poses a harder question, the one that bedevils all romantics: "Can we always be this close forever and ever?"

For couples planning to get married, Valentine's Day is one of the most popular moments to pop the question -- for turning a romantic relationship into a "forever and ever" thing. But if you aim to put a ring on it, or have already tied the knot, it's worth reflecting on the model of love and marriage that suffuses not just Valentine's Day and Taylor Swift's songs but countless movies, shows and books, from the latest offerings on the Hallmark Channel to Elizabeth Gilbert's mega-bestseller, "Eat, Pray, Love." This model is based on the idea of finding a "soulmate" -- that special person who gives you an intense emotional and erotic connection, who makes you feel happy and fulfilled.

The problem with this model is that it offers a view of marital love that is hard to sustain -- one focused on the ebb and flow of romantic feelings. Seeing marriage this way is attractive on its face, because romance is so charming. But as an ideal, it can make it more difficult for husbands and wives to embrace a richer, more stable and ultimately more satisfying idea of marriage, beyond the me-first spirit of soulmate love.

"A soulmate is someone who has the locks to fit our keys, and the keys to fit our locks," wrote Richard Bach in "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," a touchstone for this kind of thinking published in 1970. The model was a perfect fit for a decade that elevated personal self-fulfillment as a goal and expected marriage to further it. As psychologist Scott Stanley of the University of Denver writes, a soulmate is "someone for whom you would not have to make major compromises." Your soulmate should be easy to love, someone who simply makes you feel happy.

This idea has proved especially popular among young adults in the U.S. A 2011 Marist poll found that 73% of Americans believed in a soulmate, the idea that "two people . . . are destined to be together," with fully 80% of those under 30 taking this view. 

For those seeking a soulmate, what matters is emotional skills and the ability to spark romantic or sexual chemistry. These qualities are supposed to put men and women on the path to what they see as the primary goods of marriage: intimacy, self-expression and self-fulfillment.

The problem, of course, is that very few couples can maintain this romantic high. No one person, no one relationship, can give us great pleasure and great happiness all (or even most) of the time. Couples who embrace the soulmate model are often left disappointed by the real-world realities of love and marriage. As Stanley writes, "Soulmate-ism conveys an expectation of heavenly connection that makes earthbound relationships more difficult."

Take the experience of a man from Charlottesville, Va., whom I'll call Joel. He was 52 years old when I interviewed him for a book project a few years ago, and he endorsed the soulmate model of marriage. "I do believe in it," he said, adding, "It's something to strive for. You may not achieve it . . . It's something to work toward."

But marriage had been harder than Joel thought it would be, and because both he and his wife took a romanticized view of love, their ongoing disagreements about work-life balance, challenging in-laws and financial difficulties left them disillusioned. How could this be "love" if it was so much work? Their relationship spiraled downward into conflict, unhappiness and, eventually, divorce court when he was 43.

Men and women who buy into the soulmate model appear more likely to end up divorced. 

This was apparent in the 2019 California Family Survey, conducted by YouGov for the Institute for Family Studies, which asked 918 husbands and wives aged 18 to 50 to describe their approach to marriage and family life. 

They had to pick whether they saw marriage through the soulmate lens -- as "mostly about an intense, emotional/romantic connection" -- or through the lens of family -- viewing marriage as "about romance but also about kids, money [and] raising a family together."

The survey found that husbands and wives who took the soulmate view were markedly more likely to report doubts about the future of their marriage, compared to those who took a family-first view, even after controlling for factors like education, race, gender and the presence of children. Likewise, in the 2022 State of Our Unions Survey, a poll that I oversaw of 2,000 husbands and wives aged 18 to 55 across the U.S., we found that after controlling for the usual demographic factors, those who followed the soulmate model were about twice as likely to report that they were divorcing or were likely to divorce soon, compared to those following the family-first model.

Even observers who endorse today's more expressive and individualistic approach to marriage concede that it has made families less stable. "Marriage has become more joyful, more loving and more satisfying for many couples than ever before in history," argues the family historian Stephanie Coontz. "At the same time, it has become more brittle. These two strands of change cannot be disentangled."

What truths does the soulmate model fail to take into account? The first is that, for almost everyone, the intense passion and happiness we experience in romantic love fades with time. The feelings we experience at the beginning of a romantic relationship are unique, not just in our imaginations but physiologically as well. In that early phase, the brain makes and releases hormones like dopamine, norepinephrine and oxytocin that give us a relationship-induced high. These powerful chemical substances make us feel happy, energetic and connected to our beloved -- what Taylor Swift means by "magnetic force."

But this hormonal high dissipates. As most married couples discover, the "butterflies" we feel early in a relationship fly away at some point, returning only occasionally. "If passionate love is a drug -- literally a drug -- it has to wear off eventually," writes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. And then, many couples falsely conclude, "If the magic ended, it can't be true love."

The second, more subtle psychological truth that the soulmate model fails to see is that happiness -- in life and in love -- is less likely to be found when we pursue it directly. Pursuing your own happiness is like chasing a mirage of water across a desert. As many of the great philosophical and religious traditions of the West instruct us, from Aristotelian ethics to the Torah and the Christian gospel, happiness is more likely to appear when we set our compass on destinations beyond ourselves and our own desires.

This ancient wisdom is confirmed by contemporary psychology. "Doing good makes us feel good," writes psychologist David Myers of Hope College. When it comes to marriage, those who seek not so much to feel good as to do good, by loving their spouse and family members in various ways, are actually more likely to end up happy in their marriages.

The husband and father who sets aside his work, smartphone and ESPN in the evenings to help with homework, shoot hoops and tuck the kids in bed will likely take greater satisfaction from his family life than if he had pursued his own pleasures of the moment. And he will likely elicit more admiration, affection and ardor from his wife, as a natural response. Family first, me second. This is the paradoxical route to happiness in marriage.

Consider the example of an Atlanta-area woman I'll call Angela, who was 38 when I interviewed her for a 2016 book I coauthored. Angela described how her aim in marriage is to continuously "work on it," trying to figure out how best to keep things strong between her husband Rusty and herself. She makes a point of regularly kissing him and showing other small expressions of love: "Whatever it takes to make the other person feel good, that's what you have to continue, as opposed to being selfish and thinking that I have that person, and that's it."

The California Family Survey found that husbands and wives who embrace the range of goods associated with the family-first approach to marriage were 58% more likely to be satisfied with their marriages, compared to husbands and wives who were adherents of the soulmate model, after controlling for factors like race, education and income. The family-first model provides a richer and more realistic view of marriage, pushing couples to look beyond themselves and their own feelings to prioritize the welfare of their spouse and other family members.

None of this is to minimize the importance of keeping romance alive in a marriage. Research I conducted with Jeffrey Dew of Brigham Young University found that couples who have regular date nights, for instance, are about 15 percentage points more likely to be "very happy" in their marriages and about 20 percentage points more likely to be sexually satisfied compared to those with infrequent or no date nights. Cultivating romance and making time for it are a big help in sustaining marital commitment.

The paradox of contemporary marital happiness is that husbands and wives who don't focus on being in love but instead recognize that love is a decision to care for their spouse, kids and kin are more likely to find themselves happily married. And as my own research shows, no other factor -- not money, a satisfying job, a great education or even frequent sex -- is a better predictor of happiness for American men and women than a high-quality marriage.

So, if Travis ends up popping the question this Valentine's Day, after the Super Bowl, let's hope that he and Taylor come to appreciate that a "dazzling haze" of romance is indeed a magical feeling -- but it's not nearly enough for getting to "forever and ever."

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Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from his new book, "Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization," which will be published on Feb. 13 by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins (which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp)." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Don't Buy the Soulmate Myth --- Romance is not enough to forge a stable and happy marriage. Wilcox, Brad.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 10 Feb 2024: C.1.