Across history, humans have always been drawn to the idea that love isn’t random. In ancient Greece, Plato imagined that we were once whole beings with four arms, four legs and two faces, so radiant that Zeus split us in two; ever since, each half has roamed the earth searching for its missing other, a myth that gives the modern soulmate its poetic pedigree and the promise that somewhere, someone will finally make us feel complete.

In the Middle Ages, troubadours and Arthurian tales recast that longing as “courtly love”, a fierce, often forbidden devotion like Lancelot’s for Guinevere, in which a knight proved his worth through self-sacrifice for a beloved he might never openly declare.

By the Renaissance, writers such as Shakespeare were talking of “star-crossed lovers”, couples bound together by an overwhelming connection yet pulled apart by family, fortune or fate, as if the universe itself both wrote their love story and barred them from a happy ending.

In more recent times, Hollywood and romance novels have sold us fairy tale love stories.

But what does the latest science say about soulmates? Is there a particular special someone out there for us?

Viren Swami, Professor of Social Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), in Cambridge, has traced our contemporary European understanding of romantic love back to medieval Europe and those stories of Camelot, Lancelot, Guinevere and the chivalry of the knights of the round table that swept across the continent.

“These stories first pushed the idea that you should choose one other individual as your companion and that companion is for life,” he says.

“Before that, in much of Europe, you could love as many people as you like, and love was fluid, and it was often not about sex.”

Over time, as people are uprooted from their agricultural communities as industrialisation tears apart people’s familiar attachments, individuals become “alienated”, he says. “They start looking for one other individual to save them, to save them from the wretchedness of their lives.”

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