A soulmate is a person with whom one has a feeling of deep or natural affinity. This may involve similarity, love, romance, platonic relationships, comfort, intimacy, sexuality, sexual activity, spirituality, compatibility and trust. (Wikipedia)
According to Plato humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.
While perhaps most people would agree that they long for a soulmate, psychologists Helen Fisher and David Keirsey assign different kinds of mates to different temperaments. I have traced back those four temperaments to our ancestral modes of subsistence. The picture that emerges from combining them with Fisher/Keirsey looks like this:
From an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense that farmer types look for helpmates as farming required twice as much work as foraging plus childminding became mostly the work of the farmer’s wife rather than the kind of cooperative activity (alloparenting) it is among foragers. Nomadic pastoralists, on the other hand, would be interested in finding a more “adventurous” partner. But why should hunter-gatherer types be so much more choosy and want a soulmate? The answer lies in the relative rarity of forager types/intuitives, who only make up around 20-25% of the population. Being more like an egalitarian hunter-gatherer than a status-conscious food-producer entails some compatibility problems with the majority of people. The most important one: traditional gender roles, which are far less pronounced in gender-egalitarian foragers than in more patriarchal farmer and herder societies.
Plato himself was of the idealist (NF) temperament and an INFJ by type. It is therefore not surprising that his idea of separated souls having to find each other comes from him. Craving a soulmate and being attracted sexually to people with a deep connection only (demisexuality) go hand in hand. Consider the following poll about demisexuality:
Here is the breakdown in votes:
INFJ(143)
INFP(59)
INTJ(41)
INTP(35)
ENFP(22)
ENFJ(13)
ENTP(13)
ISTP(9)
ENTJ(5)
ISFJ(5)
ISFP(5)
ISTJ(4)
ESFJ(3)
ESTP(3)
ESFP(2)
ESTJ(1)
There is a clear pattern, with IN types being the most demisexual and ES types being the least demisexual. This does not mean that ES types do not need a connection with their partner. Trust is the basis for every good relationship. However, when finding a partner people usually have a variety of values with different priorities. If my hypothesis is correct, then status (power, wealth, popularity, etc.) plays a much less important role in demisexual people. The relatively small number of compatible partners often lead to asexuality:
Demisexuality, which falls on the asexuality spectrum, differs from simply wanting to wait for a deep bond to form before having sex with someone; rather, it’s more akin to the experience of being asexual until that type of connection forms, at which point the sexual attraction extends only to that person. (source)
From my experience, it is also forager types who typically have a lot of male-female friendships and platonic relationships between the sexes in general.
For more, check out my book Dating and mating for the confused and completely clueless
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