The criteria involve the rapidity with which the relationship developed, finishing one another’s sentences, and communication without words, or telepathy. As a bit of rudimentary research, I took the quiz. I put myself back in some uncomfortable 16-year-old shoes, reflected upon the feelings I remember once having regarding a certain someone whom I, at the time, regarded as my “soul-mate,” and it turns out that “it’s too hard to determine whether or not this relationship is part of destiny’s grand design” though our connection was admittedly “uncanny” and, hey, we scored a 60. I don’t remember any ESP in this relationship, which apparently may have been its undoing, but the truth is that we don’t talk anymore; haven’t talked in a long time. 

Teens are locked together in schools across the country, mingling with non- classmates on rare occasions like summer jobs and football games; they’re like captive audiences, or prey, for one another. In being forced upon one another this way it seems likely that bonds will form that are basically fundamental though not soully fundamental. But are adults really any different? The majority have offices, and bars, instead of classrooms. And adults likewise suffer from the sad conflation of romance and soul-mating. If indeed the shadowy figure of the soul-mate exists, it is suffocating beneath snowdrifts of misguided romance and quite in danger of disappearing altogether.

The obvious advantage of living in New York is this city’s status as a destination. People migrate here in droves with their very personal motivations in tow and it’s often under the heading of a “dream.” With so many people in one place with all of their ambitions, the chance of running into someone with a dream or a personality or a soul that complements one’s own seems statistically greater. Can New Yorkers actually Mind Find and Bind as soul-mates better than romantic partners? Perhaps.

But this gives New Yorkers a large benefit of the doubt: Are these dreams we come here with really buttressed by a love of actual self- betterment for its own sake or is it something more like greed, self-absorption, ego? I mean this in a very classical sense; as our New York now is the cultural crossroads of the world, centuries back Athens played a similar role. And in that very alive metropolis, there were men who conveniently debated this topic for us, though of course to no final solution. Plato’s Symposium gives us several versions of love, often romantic love, that are attached to the soul mate. Perhaps you’ve seen Hedwig and the Angry Inch where they illustrate Aristophanes’s bisected human-sphere theory, one that fully relies upon there being one match for one person. In a conversation with a priestess, however, Socrates rounds out the Symposium by giving us love that may very well involve another human, though does not necessarily spring from that person’s human-ness. This is to say that the soul, the soul who strives for wisdom and knowledge, will not search for the physical perchance stumbling upon the transcendental and beautiful, but vice versa.

If a soul is “lucky enough to find a mind that is beautiful, noble, and naturally gifted” it “is strongly drawn to that combination.” The classical paradigm is of course idealized and does, to a degree, make the encountering of a soul-mate sound like a matter of frequent chance, as though all men are noble and naturally gifted. While this may not be the case, Socrates opens up the very likely possibility of a person having more than one soul-mate, something that should strike a chord in our modern-day metropolis. If, in fact, New York is home to so many persons struggling to use their natural gifts, these qualities should readily be on display, and thus we find here that there could very well be many. 

But New York’s inhabitants are self- possessed; so much that is done here is to advance one’s own social standing, obtain better benefits, get your own apartment, and then get your own apartment in Tribeca. In a sense there is some Randian level of fulfillment at work here, but even she would balk at the myriad ways in which we close ourselves off to the encounter of an intellectual equal. And this is accomplished by always placing the matching of souls within the romantic dynamic. 

Those billboards at every major intersection in the city, straddling our search-engines, plastered in the Times and New Yorker—all of these forums advertised in our city promise to pair us with the one, our soul-mate, who will happen to be our romantic love as well. So it is that the search for the romantic soul-mate becomes the goal of being; and while it’s possible and certainly desirable, does it not run the least bit counter to our nature as intelligent beings?

The question of the soul-mate really comes down to the actual benefit having such a person in one’s life would provide. It seems a bit frivolous and new-agey to contemplate all of the truisms that swirl around this relation; again, google away and you’ll find “yings” and “yangs” and “complementary beings” and all sorts of terminology that all boils down to what Socrates was trying to tell everyone: in striking out on our own into the world, armed with talents and acquiring knowledge, we should hopefully find other like-minded individuals around us to make this pursuit all the more enjoyable to be sure, but even more so to make the whole endeavor a bit more worthwhile, to drive it a bit deeper into the heart of things.

But how can the major New York discrepancy be reconciled; the one that places personal, individual success perhaps ahead of forming intelligent connections with kindred souls (and I most definitely don’t mean networking)? Furthermore, in a city where personal well-being is so coveted and where romance is very often a one-night, two-night, or three-night stand, is the soul-mate, or soul-tribe as it’s been called, really any great priority? 

Certain internet dating sites may boast high success rates in the matches they create and claim to offer questionnaires and profiles that will truly reveal the person behind the screen-name, but these sites are about love, and romantic love at that (and really, believing these profiles as endeavors in total human honesty gives people a very, very large benefit of the doubt). If the soul-mate is something worth pursuing or discovering, it seems the most honest way to go about doing it is to continue on New York’s trajectory of dream-chasing and self-determination, collecting those of our ilk along the way, and taking some slight satisfaction in the meantime’s loneliness.