Do we all have a soul mate in the world?

Oh the love! Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had a soul mate hidden in the immensity of the earth? Knowing that there is a perfect one waiting for your arrival, and in the magical moment of exchanging glances, understanding that you were made for each other. According to research published on the blog What if? That would be horrible.

Unlike what we learned in romantic comedy movies and sweet songs, the likelihood of finding “the lid of your pan” is very rare. Let's say you do have a perfect person - the guy or girl of your dreams - couldn't you be happy with anyone else? Could you ever meet?

Breaking hearts

Assuming your soul mate was born. You don't know who she is or where she is, but - as Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant taught us - the moment you first see each other, recognition and passion are instantaneous, right? Perhaps.

Right off the bat, this assumption raises a question: Is your perfect match still alive? About 100 billion individuals have passed through the planet. However, currently only 7 billion of them are alive - so the overall human mortality rate is 93%. If we were all to make random pairs, 90% of our soul mates would have been dead by some time.

It sounds bad, but it gets worse. We cannot limit ourselves to the people of the past, we must also include the indefinite number of humans who will still inhabit the planet. After all, if it is possible that your soul mate was born in the distant past, it also means that it can be conceived in another period of the future.

Made for each other

So as not to break your hopes, let's say your "half of the orange" was born at the same time as you. In addition, she is also about the same age. Given these constraints, most of us have about half a billion potential pairs.

However, what about gender, sexual orientation, culture and language? It is possible to use several subcategories to try to delimit this calculation, but we cannot deviate from the idea of ​​a random half face. Therefore, you know nothing about the other person until you look him in the eye. So everyone has only one orientation - toward their true love no matter who they are.

The chances of finding your ideal match are incredibly slim. The number of strangers we make eye contact every day is pretty hard to estimate. It can range from almost none (valid for inmates and small town dwellers) to tens of thousands (just think of everyone you see on public transport).

Suppose you exchange glances with a few dozen strangers every day - without looking like a stalker or a pervert, please. If 10 of them are close to their age range, this generates a value of approximately 50, 000 individuals over a lifetime.

If you have 500 million potential soul mates, that means you have only one chance in life to find true love in 10, 000 opportunities to remain forever alone .

I do not want to die single!

With the imminent threat of dying alone, society could restructure itself to try to establish as much eye contact as possible. Maybe build front mats on which their possible "pan lids" slip past? Perhaps ban mobile phones on crowded subways or stipulate that strangers must be kept on the street?

However, if eye contact were to work through webcams, it would be possible to use a modified version of ChatRoulette or Omegle to find your "spout". If everyone used the system eight hours a day, seven days a week, and only took a few seconds to decide if someone is their soul mate or not, in theory, it would take a few decades for everyone to form a couple.

However, in real life it is very difficult to find room for romance. Therefore, only the rich or the idle could spend all this time in front of the computer in search of true love. But even for this privileged 1%, it is very likely that your dearest half is among the other 99%.

So if only 1% of people used the service, only 1% of that would find the right match - somewhere in 1 in 10, 000. The rest of the disillusioned would be encouraged to look for other ways to seek love. In addition, careers such as supermarket checkout, bus collector, and store salesman would be slapped by romantics as they provide greater chances for eye contact.

Still, even if some of us could spend a few years surfing ChatRolette or work in places with lots of eye to eye, the rest would still have to rely on luck and perhaps a minority until they could find true love. However, it is very likely that most humans would remain unlucky.

The despair of love

Given all the social pressure and stress generated by the need to have someone to relate to, many people would feign feelings. They want to join the club, so they team up with other loners and stage fake encounters as they learned in the movies. They get married, hide their relationship problems with a beautiful smile and say it's okay, because now they are no longer alone ... Something that never really happens, right?

* Posted on 5/21/2015