Valentine's Day History

Not all writing about the soulmate is positive – an expert in the philosophy of love explains the concept's thorny history.

We have one life to live, and we choose to spend it with each other, for however long it lasts. While we live in a world where mortgages often last longer than marriages, the desire to share a life with someone is not going away any time soon. I am not sure that either of us would be cut out for such a demanding role. In fact, an eternity for any of us would be a little too much. The need to think that relationships could last runs deep. Loving and being loved changes us, but it does not stop us from being human, with all that entails. The stability of these images reassures us that love is something deep, but we can also be trapped by them. They belong together, but the price of their misplaced love is eternal suffering. It is spiritually driven – he literally goes through hell to see her – but the meeting itself is a kind of judgment. [he wrote](https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=eng_pubs), “you must have a Soul-mate.” However, the imagery Coleridge tried to capture is much older. This is an idea that Plato had already considered and rejected. That slowed us down a bit.