The word "Soulmate" has been popping up a lot. It seems to have made its way permanently into the English vernacular. As of the past few months, even I have been asked if I am "looking for my soulmate". My general reaction is what the hell is a soulmate? The word doesn?t mean anything to me. It has all these touchy feely connotations, and what bothered me most was that I don't know exactly what the word means.



In Islamic circles it seems to be related to the idea that we have been created in pairs. Somehow two people are cosmically meant to be together. Soulmate seems to imply that two people are linked spiritually and physically in a unique way that nothing should be able to break. If that is the case, then there are some serious implications - potentially calamitous ones for people who view love and belonging in this manner.



One implication is that there is at most one optimal pairing of people. Any other pairing would be sub-optimal and thus should be avoided. This is bad for obvious reasons. Firstly there are a lot of married people in this world, and as a matter of statistical distributions most of them should be in sub-optimal pairings. Does this mean they should be looking around for their real soulmate while they are in a relationship - a pitt stop of sorts.



How do you decide if person X is really your soulmate? Maybe there are special glowing tasbih that light up when you are near your soulmate. How do you decide between two seemingly good candidates? If you are a guy, maybe you take both and weed the wrong one out over time. If you are a woman, it?s a 50-50 shot.



There is another problem with soulmates. The canonical examples of soulmates are Romeo & Juliet, Laila & Majnoon and Heer & Ranjha. I don?t want to be like them. They all died and ended up with bupkiss. If being a soulmate is a tragic novelty, I will gladly pass. I would like to end up living with the company of my better half sharing in the fabled marital bliss, not literary novelty. To me it seems that the soulmate route is not the one to take.



Still it bothered me that I am making a blanket statement and being hasty in my conclusions. Surely all these people can't be wrong. Most people talk about marriage, love and relationships in terms of compromise. This seemed like a good place to start, and so I chose economics as a way to think about soulmates. It seems the central idea in economics is resource allocation and thus tradeoffs. After some thought I have decided to modify the static concept of soulmate to a slightly more objective formulation (albeit far less romantic one).



Mathematically this can be expressed as:

SoulmateRatio = (Total Love Benefit / Total Love Cost)



Your soulmate is the person who will maximize your soulmate ratio and vice versa. If another person exists that has the ability to give you a higher soulmate ratio, then the person you are with is not your soulmate. No one in this world, including yourself, could make you happier than being in love with your soulmate. True love is the love you share with your soulmate.



Some people believe that a potential soulmate may be living halfway around the world. The odds are against this happening due to cultural differences unless you just moved from there. Additionally, geographical distance will increase search, research, and maintenance costs. Unless one of you decides to take the risk to move to the other person's location, he/she is not your soulmate.



The longer you are in love with your soulmate, the higher the soulmate ratio becomes. Better communication skills will emerge and you will share more experiences resulting in more similarities. It is only after you finished the research phase and had been in love for many years can you determine if the person you are with is indeed your soulmate.



Suffice it to say that I believe that there is more than one person out there for each of us. Optimality in relationships is a chiefly a function of how much work we put into it, and how much we value it. Without a way to verify the cosmic soulmate-ness of our partner, the idea remains quaint and charming, but not a particularly useful one.



















How it is that you can show penis on tv but not on the radio?