Work Text:
You know about it. It was one of the very first things you learned. In the picture books you read as a child all you could remember was one day you’ll touch someone and know that the world made them for you. You remember that. Mummy and mom are married because they're soulmates. You remember the simple drawings, the little red heart that floated over two crayon characters when you thought about it while you coloured later. You remember it all.
Soulmates are another incredibly common trope that pops up in fanfiction the world over. At the time of writing the Alternate Universe - Soulmates tag on Archive of our Own has nearly 60,000 entries. Though perhaps not as common online as other fic tropes we’ve covered, I could argue that the concept of a soulmate is perhaps the oldest trope (that has been translated into a fanfiction context) that exists out there.
The first idea of a soulmate - though it wasn’t yet named that - comes from the voice of Aristophanes, noted Grecian playwright from the 400s BCE. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes posits the idea of the origins of love - that originally humans had four legs, four arms, two heads and two torsos, conjoined, but their appearance was so monstrous that Zeus had them cut in half and their sexual organs moved to the front. However, the bodies - so upset by the loss, would wander the earth forever looking for their other half.
Aristophanes says - “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole…and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.”
One of the most early uses of the descriptor ‘soulmate’ comes from a letter from poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1822 - “To be happy in Married Life … you must have a Soul-mate,” but I’m certain there were other various pennings of the term around then too.
This seemingly spiritual connection, this unique and mystical bond - that’s what a soulmate is.
In our real lives, a soulmate is someone who you find and immediately click with, who being with is as natural as breathing. It mightn’t be a romantic partner, and your romantic partner mightn’t be your soulmate. Some people subscribe to the concept, some don’t, but regardless, it has wandered its way into popular culture, where shows like the Bachelor preach the concept of finding your ‘one’, and a particular flavour of romance movie desperately chases the ‘true love’s kiss’.
I could feel her there now, a constant pressure under my skin. When she moved, my body moved. When she spoke, my blood sang. I would know if she was hurt, if she needed me, if she wanted me. I would know it all.
Soulmates in fanfiction contexts show up in a variety of places and in a variety of ways. Maybe you’ve been born with a birthmark that’s the exact shape and location of where your soulmate will first touch you. Maybe you feel their pain all through your life until you meet for the first time. Maybe you have a timer on your wrist counting down until the first moment you meet them.
Maybe you’re inscribed from birth with the first words that they’ll ever say to you written on your body.
These are just a few of the ways that soulmates show up within fanfiction canon, and there are thousands more (I have not even touched the tip of the intensely creative iceberg). Regardless, in their existence, they ascribe a lot of their creation to some form of destiny or overarching religious presence.
In our world some people believe in the theory of soulmates, some people do not. I personally am in the latter camp - In a world of such variety and beauty and endless personality, I do not understand why a power that controls all would limit me to find myself in only one person.
However, in fanfiction worlds where soulmates exist, people must hold some kind of specific - and worldwide - belief in some kind of higher power.
How could the soulmate system be created - how could people awake with writing on their skin, or timers embedded in their wrists in the very language they speak and style of time that they recognise without there being a higher power that controls it?
Surely, some soulmate scenarios can be explained away by science - technically, if you squint. In a world where you are marked by the touch of your soulmate’s hand on your skin, maybe it’s an evolutionary mechanism and you’re a perfect genetic fit. Same deal with the ‘feeling your soulmate’s pain’ thing - you should want to protect each other so you can procreate.
But some of those other situations? They’re worlds where immediately you must believe the concepts of a) there is one person and only one person out there for you, and b) someone is controlling your destiny enough to create that other person and control time enough that you and them will meet.
Yeah, that’s kinda freaky. I definitely think that would change how religion would exist in a world like that - how would you pray if you knew some higher power (whether it was a god, or an alien race, or something similar) was definitely listening?
I wasn’t born with a timer on my wrist. I’m fine with it, actually. I’ve made some friends out of it. The Timerless, we call ourselves. There’s five of us in Upstate New York. Sometimes we get dinner out, have pizza, go to a show.
Everyone’s with their soulmates, but that’s fine.
Destiny doesn’t need to control me, anyway.
There are pros and cons with any kind of fanfiction trope, especially when you bring them into real life.
Let’s look at the pros.
For starters, you know there’s someone out there for you. Whether or not you know who they are or when you’ll meet doesn’t matter - you know you’ll meet them and they’ll be the person you need in your life, the person you’ll always want.
Maybe the world would be more equitable and less bigoted if the person you're destined to love could be anyone out there at all.
But then, let’s look at the cons.
And there are… a few.
In a soulmate-based world that doesn’t have timers counting down to the moment that you meet, what do you do about meeting your soulmate? Do you spend your entire life searching, turning down every other opportunity in the world just because you’re waiting for your one?
What happens if destiny says you’ll meet your soulmate at the age of 95 three months before you die? Have you wasted your life waiting?
What happens to those whose soulmate is a bad person?
You can be incredibly shitty and still be loved. What if your soulmate is an abuser, or harmful, or falling apart at the seams? What if your meeting makes your and their lives worse? What if they want to love you by harming you?
Do you divorce? Are you even allowed to divorce in a world that says that there is one, and only one, out there for you? In that world is divorce even an option?
Can you truly escape from your soulmate?
What happens if you don’t get a match?
It only takes one tiny error in a long line of code, one tiny change in development pathways, one benevolent god taking a break to have a cup of tea for something to go wrong.
Maybe you don’t get a soulmate.
You would be bullied, you’d be looked down upon, you’d be made fun of.
Or maybe, you’d be free.