Can data help you meet your soul mate?

Let’s make you win at dating roulette with algebra!

Cynics are abundant who scoff at the prospect of ‘true’ love saying its Santa Claus and that they love their freedom and enjoy not having to answer about their whereabouts to another person. And then there are those with cupid’s arrow struck deep in them. Some thinkers have argued that the best way to meet your soul mate and find ever-lasting love is to first give up the myth of meeting “the one”!

If we look at the scenario rationally then chances are that if there is only one person in this entire planet who is our soul mate, they could be of any age or culture and located at any location far away from where we are. And if we ignore the hetero-normative viewpoint then they are probably not even of the desired gender we are looking for if we consider solely an individuality point of view. Then in this one life time we may never meet that ‘one’ person who is our missing puzzle piece.

Yet knowing all of that, the concept of a soul mate allures the best of us, we go after such a vague idea, imagining anybody who texts us on Tinder and has a profile picture with a dog or his wrinkly old, adorable looking grandma that they are THE ONE. We hunt with tremendous ambition, try and calculate the odds to find salvation in a human mirror. Someone who can rip apart our ego a little, show us our main obstacles and addictions and break your heart ruthlessly so that new light can enter.

But in this vast world with seven billion such apparent human mirrors how likely are we to find such a mythical creature?!

A former scientist from NASA now turned into a comic creator — Randall Munroe has a great explanation of such absurd, hypothetical questions in his book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.

In this book he acknowledges this situation of people having only a single random person as our one true soul mate who lives somewhere in the world, as a truly problematic situation, a nightmare as one might put it. He assumes that we all have one randomly assigned perfect human soul-mate, with the openness and skepticism of a roboticist along with the snarky tone of a cartoonist.

Here is an excerpt from his writings –

“We will assume your soul mate is set at birth. You know nothing about who they are or where they are, but considering as a romantic cliché you ought to recognize each other the moment your eyes meet.

So, right away this raises a few questions. Like for starters, is your soul mate even alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion of them are alive now (this gives the human condition a mortality rate of 93%). So, if we are paired up in random almost 90 percent of our soul mates are long gone dead”.

And as if this truth bomb was not enough, Munroe decides to further pop our bubble of soul-mate searching happiness with another revelation. Things get worse when we consider the arrow of time:

“A simple argument states that we cannot just limit ourselves to the humans of the past, we also have to include the unknown quantity of future humans as well. See if it is possible for your soul mate to be in the distant past then it is also possible for soul mates to be in the distant future. After all, your soul mate’s soul mate is”.

He then further goes on about gender orientation and language and culture, about using demographics, but in that way we will begin to drift away from our initial thought of having randomly assigned soul mates. So he stuck to the basic idea of recognizing one’s soul mate by simply looking at their eyes. In that case everybody must have only one orientation — and that is to be towards their soul mate.

But taking the number of people we make eye contact with everyday is hard to estimate. This number can vary from almost none to several thousands. For people who are shut-ins or live in small towns or villages to people like a traffic police officer in Times Square.

Now if we narrow our search down to about a dozen people whom we make eye contact with everyday. And about 10 percent of them are close to our age then that will leave us with around 50,000 people in one lifetime. So, that will leave you with 500,000,000 potential soul mates so that leaves you with the chances of meeting only one true love in a lifetime out of 10,000.

In that scenario, you will be left with a situation that looks like below:

Munroe in his book goes further into a science fictional situation which is reminiscent of 1930 prediction for the future of love, by Malcolm Cowley. There he envisioned an artificial platform which will maximize on eye contact exposure; this is a webcam based system which is similar ChatRoulette, this he dubs as “SoulMateRoulette”.

His findings lead to an interesting discovery when taking this approach. If we have everyone use the system for 8 hours straight in a day, for seven days a week and if someone takes a couple of seconds to decide that a person is there soul mate then this system could in theory, match everyone up with their soul mates within a matter of few decades.

But in the real world, people seldom have time for romance and all most nobody can devote decades of time at all for romance with only a few who can devote as much as two decades for it. But the situation is still pretty simple then; only about 1 percent of the population belonging to the rich kids will be able to spend time to look for soul mates, and for that 1 percent they will still find their match out of the remaining 99 percent. So, if only 1 percent of the people use this service then out of this 1 percent only 1 percent of them will find their match through this system, i.e. one in thousand.

To further explore this situation, we find outrageous revelations that are heart breaking for the avid soul mate seeker. As Munroe understands this phenomenon with a deeper look he arrives at a familiar outcome, resembling real life.

Given all this stress on soul mate and true love, some people would definitely fake it to join the club. They will make efforts to join the club, so that they would get together with another lonely person. Soon enough they will find themselves faking a soul mate situation. They will get married but hide their marital and relationship problems. And finally they will no longer be able to present a happy face to either friends or family.

This conclusion may seem tragically heart breaking to most. It contrasts the hopelessness of the soul mate theory with further mind-numbing hopelessness that keeps our hearts and souls alive with a sense of possibility. So, will this conclusion rob us of our immutable optimist that helps us to keep living and loving?

Data science and algorithm along with the snaky remarks of masked sensitivity in Munroe’s book sheds light on the matter of deep mysteries as to how the lightning chooses its victim or if we stir a cup of tea vigorously will it automatically come to a boil?!

So, in conclusion, we think that love and romance cannot be colonized with simple validation of the rites of the Universal System. So, men and women mustn’t dumb themselves down to meet the idea of regressive love. We think and as the data supports, soul mate cannot be searched for from existing entities, it must be created with time and effort.