The cast of The Golden Girls: Estelle Getty (Sophia), Bea Arthur (Dorothy), Rue McClanahan (Blanche) and Betty White (Rose)
‘You complete me.’ Remember that line from Jerry Maguire? Oh, how we swooned at the very notion: that Renée Zellweger (and her admittedly adorable bespectacled child) were the missing Lego pieces in Tom Cruise’s life. Twenty-eight years on (yes, that’s how long it’s been since that movie came out – deep breath), experts agree that that kind of declaration should be a pretty obvious red flag. ‘When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,’ psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, ‘we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.’ And yet the romantic ideal of a soulmate persists: that one relationship that ticks all the boxes. We have come to expect that finding The One will be a one-stop shop: for a confidant, a best friend, a co-parent, a lover, a roommate, a co-homeowner, a caregiver, a travel partner, a default plus-one…
As social psychologist Bella DePaulo puts it, we also expect our soulmate to be our sole mate. Eli Finkel, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, calls this the era of the ‘self-expressive marriage’: we demand love and companionship, and we want our partner to fulfil all our deep psychological needs. Your spouse, Prof Finkel says, has become the Michelangelo to your proverbial chunk of marble: the one tasked with unearthing the best version of you.
Meanwhile, a 2015 study led by psychologist Elaine Cheung found that people who disperse their emotional needs across multiple relationships are happier than those who concentrate