Do you believe in a soul mate? Or do you see your romantic relationship as a journey where you share a backpack? This is exactly what we will talk about today.
Last update: 22 March, 2022
In many cases, we prefer to ignore the fact that love is blind. When people fall in love and start a relationship, it's a magical time and not a time to think too much. Many people stick to their particular view of the soul mate theory. Far fewer realize, however, that love is a journey.
Love that has turned into perfect unity, into "my half", sounds really good. However, it seems that couples who believe in this ideal of a perfect relationship end up having worse relationships than those who see their relationship as a company trip.
This journey does not refer to soulmates made for each other, but to a life adventure where you don't walk alone. It is a journey in which obstacles are overcome, goals and intentions are reached, and the couple works as a team facing difficulties day after day. Usually these are couples who tend to value the results obtained and all the experiences lived together.
An evaluation of the way of understanding love
This is the topic that social psychologists Spike WS Lee of the University of Toronto, and Norbert Schwarz, of the University of Southern California, set out to study.
Their findings proved that people who believe in perfect unity in love are often disappointed.
Conversely, people who conceive their romantic relationships as a personal development journey in the company of their partner are more satisfied with their long-term romantic relationships. This seems to lead us to the conclusion that different ways of understanding love also lead to different ways of evaluating it.
The experiment
Lee and Schwarz's team worked with groups of couples who had been together for years, who were asked to complete a knowledge test in which they had to include expressions related to the idea of ​​love as unity or love as journey. They were also asked to remember the situations they experienced with their partner who had provoked both conflict and celebration and, finally, to rate their relationship.
Remembering the moments of celebration made people feel more satisfied with their relationship, regardless of how they conceived of love: whether they followed the idea of ​​soul mates or love as a journey in company.
For those who believed in soulmates, though, remembering the conflicts that occurred in their relationships led the participants to feel less satisfied. However, this dissatisfaction did not occur in the case of those who viewed their relationship as a journey.
Love is a journey: in-depth experiments
In the second part of the experiment, volunteers were asked to identify geometric shapes with which to form a complete circle, as a metaphor for love as unity. Also, they had to draw a line from point A to point B through a maze, this time as a simile of the journey.
These were the non-linguistic cues used in the experiment, which made it possible to change the way individuals assessed their relationships.
Love is a journey, an adventure
The study corroborated other previous investigations on the same topic and provided conclusions worth reflecting on. The conception of the couple on slippery ground that extends the idea of ​​a "soul mate" usually generates fragile foundations and inflexible in the face of error.
On the contrary, considering the sentimental relationship as a journey full of tribulations to go through in company increases the satisfaction for what has been achieved after having overcome so many and very difficult tests that life sometimes presents.
We are probably not meant to be with anyone in particular. Probably what we need to do is prepare ourselves to take the journey of life in the company of our partner and face it for what it is, a long team adventure.
