Here is how I see it. I may have some of the dates wrong, or some of the trends reversed, and some of you who are older than I am, who also remember the onslaught of the whole “FIND YOUR SOULMATE” craze may be able to illuminate me, but here is how I remember it:
At some point, in the mid-1980s, (and I was in high school then, and college, so I wasn’t really paying attention to cultural trends as such. It was more like I was fully participating in them, unconsciously) Anyway, at some point in the mid-1980s, the whole love-industry took off like a nuclear explosion. We live in that world now, we take it for granted to some degree, we live in the repercussions of that original explosion (and again, anyone who is older than I am may have a different perspective, and be able to enlighten me) – There are now entire sections in book stores devoted to love, finding love, how to keep love, how to embrace love, how to find the perfect man/woman, how to give the perfect man/woman the perfect orgasm, how to make your marriage last, how to keep your man in line, how to encourage your woman to masturbate like a banshee, how to go on dates and snag a man, how to float through the ether of time and astral travel and find that perfect “soulmate” … It is now an INDUSTRY. Whereas before, not so much. Maybe there would be a “Relationships” SHELF in the bookstore, and on it would be the memoirs of a hippie-dippie tofu-eating middle-aged couple who wrote erotic love letters to each other (filled with phrases like: “When you go away, I feel the soulful energy in the house disappear…”) and then published them (anyone remember that book? I used to have it … can’t recall the author, but the book was called “Notes to Myself”. It’s pure ICK. Update: Oh my God. I just found it.) So there would be that kind of stuff: hippie-dippie love memoirs illustrated with line drawings that look like they were done by a kindergartener. There would also be the old standard The Joy of Sex. And a couple others, on how to have a happy marriage, you know – basic. No big deal. It was a topic like any other: gardening, cooking, pregnancy.
But now? We are talking full-blown OBSESSION. This also goes back to the comments down here on Jean Kerr, come to think about it. In the article I linked to, the writer said that mothers now want to get Straight A’s in parenting, whereas women of Jean Kerr’s generation pretty much took mothering on a Pass-Fail basis. They weren’t trying to score higher than everybody else, or be the Valedictorian-Mommy, whatever.
That obsession is also apparent in these books about love, finding a mate. Look at the cover of Cosmo, Glamour, Redbook, and over and over, you see the same PANICKED headlines.
For example:
“GET HIM TO COMMIT.” (Uhm … whaddya think I am, an idiot? Is “he” not also a full person, able to make his own choices? WHY ON EARTH do I want to be with someone who WON’T commit to me and I have to turn myself inside out to “GET HIM” to say Yes to me? I’m tellin’ ya, I’ve had boyfriends – and when they’re into you? Wild horses wouldn’t drag them away. They are all over you. When they’re into you, they can’t WAIT to “commit”. It’s such a better experience. Trust me. When someone (duh) actually chooses you because he WANTS TO CHOOSE YOU, not because you read some article in Cosmo about how to “get him to commit”. I find this whole “trend” disgusting, in general, and very insulting to the guys.)
“GIVE HIM THE BEST SEX OF HIS LIFE.” (Er. Okay. Thanks for SCREAMING that at me, as I stand in line buying orange juice. Thanks. You’re givin’ me a heart attack though. Can’t he and I just mess around like a normal man and a normal woman and give each other pleasure in, you know, the basic way that humans do? Does it have to be ‘THE BEST EVER’? Am I allowed to take this one on a Pass-Fail basis, or … are you demanding that I get a Straight A?)
The panic is everywhere.
I am not saying that I submit, constantly, to the panic. And I am not blaming Glamour magazine for SHRIEKING at me as I stand in line at the store. I don’t HAVE to buy those magazines, and in general, I do not. I don’t HAVE to succumb to the general “WHERE IS MY SOULMATE” panic. We all have choices. But that’s not really what this little overview piece is about. For me, this is about how the way we even TALK about these issues (love, sex, relationships) has changed, dramatically, in the last 30 years.
Some of these changes are good. There isn’t a complete mystique around sex, there isn’t a silence around relationships – we can talk about stuff now that was completely taboo not too long ago. I’m for that (to some degree). Like my mother telling me, when I was 10 years old, about my period, and what to expect, and how to use the feminine products and stuff like that. I know women of other generations who were completely unprepared for the changes their bodies would go through, and were (naturally) TERRIFIED when they suddenly started bleeding. “Randomly”. So I’m all for getting the information out there. You can make choices about your life and how you are going to conduct yourself only if you know what you’re up against, and what you can expect. This is a positive change.
But if you actually go and scan all of the titles in the “LOVE & RELATIONSHIPS” section at Barnes & Noble, which I did a couple days ago, in preparation for this post, you start to get the feeling that something has gone seriously wrong here. You start to feel like everybody in this country is completely psychotic. You start to feel like you are surrounded by complete and utter morons, who are unable to even wipe their asses without a book to tell them how to do it.
Just as an experiment, go to the LOVE & RELATIONSHIPS aisle, take 2 seconds, and scan the titles. It’s scary. The books, taken all together, emanate extreme neuroses. I’m sure some of them are quite good, and helpful. I’m talking about this whole thing as an INDUSTRY. The industry itself emanantes neuroses, perfectionism, and anxiety. Cripplingly so.
So back to the “soulmate industry”, which is an entire sub-topic of all of this.
I believe that the “soulmate” thing has taken on so much meaning, and become so popular for a couple of reasons:
1. The self-help industry becoming so ubiquitous and so everywhere that we really, actually, don’t even NOTICE it anymore.
2. In line with that: the assumption made by the self-help industry that everything in life is a PROBLEM which has a SOLUTION. (I should probably say more on this later, too, cause it’s difficult waters and I do not want to paint with too broad a brush. I am not anti-therapy. But I am anti the attitude of the industry that everything in life, every mess, every human problem, can be “fixed”, as though something is perpetually WRONG. I take a cold-eyed view of this. To the self-help industry, everybody BETTER walk around feeling perpetually wounded, because otherwise THEY would be out of a job.) So – Let’s FIX everybody, shouts the self-help industry. “You lost your child in a car accident and 2 years later you still have bouts of weeping? That is a PROBLEM and here is the SOLUTION”. That’s an extreme example, but I think I’ve made my point. The self-help industry wants a neat and clean and tidy little world, where everyone’s “issues” are compartmentalized, and “fixed”, where you can always “talk” about your “issues”, and “talking through your issues” (we all know) helps you to heal yourself. (I think that’s a load of crap, by the way, but that’s another post entirely).
Let me just say something quickly here, because I REALLY don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings with this: I have been in therapy myself. And it did me a lot of good. In my late 20s to early 30s I had a serious problem with depression. Might as well just say it. Actually, the problem goes wayyyy back to when I was a teenager, but it really became debilitating later in life. And so I do not want to say that all therapy sucks, and also that MY way is right for EVERYone. I do not think that. Finally, a couple years ago, I spontaneously fired my therapist, and I’ve never looked back. I had HAD it with just talking about shit, going over and over the same territory … so I fired her ass, started up the blog, and I haven’t had a bout with depression since. (If you knew me, you would know that this is a miracle). However, I know people whose entire lives were saved by therapy (not to mention antidepressants) – so I do not want to discount that. This stuff is really personal, and what’s good for one person wouldn’t be right for another.
As I see it:
The love/relationships book explosion is closely related to the self-help-book explosion. Again, it is because of this whole “Let’s FIX everything and everybody” mentality that has now completely taken over our culture. You’re single? That is a PROBLEM. Let’s FIX it. (Now, obviously, if you hate being single, then you hate being single, but do you need to read 20 books to validate this? Can’t you just … oh, you know … go on some dates, maybe?? Join the school of REAL life, not the 12-Days-to-a-Brand-New-You program?)
The explosion of books on the whole LOVE THING has occurred in my lifetime. Book stores, and books in general, changed drastically. I would say that this probably occurred in the early to mid 1980s. And it has STILL not died down.
I will admit that I got completely sucked into the whole “I want a soulmate” thing, and this was, I would say, between the ages of 17 and 25. Those were the years when that kind of thinking dominated my choices. Which makes sense. In looking back on it, it does seem that the “perfect soulmate” conversation belongs to youth. And immaturity, dare I say. And yet the people who are heading up this whole industry are far from young. These people are middle-aged, some of them are older than that.
In other words, they should know better!!!
I outgrew my obsession with finding a soulmate. Maybe it’s just the word itself I dislike so much. Soulmate? It comes with so much baggage now, it’s a shorthand and the word itself has no meaning. It’s thrown around too much, and so has no power.
More to come on this topic … I would say I have about 2 more essays to go on this whole “soulmate” thing. (One thing: A note to anyone out there who disagrees with me, and who believes in soulmates, or who believes they have actually “found” a soulmate … I definitely want to hear from you. All of this stuff comes from my own personal experience, like I said – I have no proof, how could I have proof? I do have some DAMN strong opinions about it, but still … I would love to hear from other sides on this issue.)
I have my own theory about this. Yes, it’s partly due to the general rise in therapy/self-help culture (which I think has a lot to do with finding secular replacements for organized religion), but in my opinion the “soulmate” thing is borne out of the inherent contradictions of marriage based on love. The institution of marriage has been completely overhauled since the 1960s, first with the sexual revolution and then the women’s movement. By the 1980s, around the time the obsession with soulmates began, stark radical 1970s feminism was on the wane, and most women were trying to accommodate their feminist and traditional impulses, which combined in the idea of personal-choice love marriage. Marriage used to be about sticking together no matter what, now it’s almost exclusively about the feelings of the two partners.
The problem, of course, is that those feelings tend to die – love often does not last. But if you’re basing your whole life on them, and you’re imposing this superstructure of traditional marriage on them, wrapping them up in this idea of “forever,” you HAVE to believe it will work out. This is the unspoken anxiety behind soulmate culture, as I see it.
You can just ask Brad & Jen about the whole love not lasting thing.
“the unspoken anxiety behind the soulmate culture”. I like how you put that. That’s what I sensed, when I scanned all the books at the store – this unspoken anxiety.
Now again, I succumbed to it myself as a younger woman. I’m going to post about my own soulmate experiences when I have a second.
Then I’m taking on Richard Bach. That’s the post I’m procrastinating writing.
Checkout lines are a big place for me to have existential pique. All of a sudden, I start thinking, “I can’t believe there is an entire industry devoted to putting THE STAR at the point of sale.” And I am sickened by my base attraction to it. But alien babies are still very fascinating.
I still like the idea of having a soulmate, in the Anne of Green Gables sense. But I think you’re right about that being something properly confined to youth or, perhaps, immaturity. (As a side note, the closest I ever came to having a soulmate was the summer I spent with a young woman before she was to be married that fall. It’s a long but, somewhat surprisingly, not too sordid a story. Anyway, though I thought at the time she should marry me instead of the other guy, in retrospect I’m happy she didn’t.)
Bernard –
Ah yes, but Anne of Green Gables wasn’t looking for a soulmate – she was searching for a “kindred spirit”. What’s the difference, everyone on the planet might ask?
I’m not sure.
I know I like the term “kindred spirit” better.
I’ve got my own not-sordid story, sort of like yours. I’ll be posting the bare bones of it shortly.
I think there is a tendency to wildly over-sell something when there’s a deep, underlying anxiety about it. But you’re right, Sheila – anxiety or not, it’s especially bad for middle-aged folks to be selling soul-mates as an ideal when they ought to know better. Not that it’s impossible to find a life-long mate, but in even the best, most stable relationships there will be serious conflict and people will occasionally question the sanity of their partner. The soul-mate concept simply contravenes the inherent complexity of human beings and human relationships…
MikeR:
I am still procrastinating on writing the last piece in this soulmate thing – a point by point analysis of Richard Bach’s work.
Richard Bach, who made millions off of the soulmate industry and helped create it, later divorced his so-called soulmate and then was shocked when his readers were devastated and angry about it.
He said he didn’t look at it as a divorce, but as a “graduation”. To me, that STINKS of self-justification and … uhm … denial? But then again, what do I know … I don’t know the man.
I still think it’s kind of funny (and not all that surprising) that this soulmate guru who wrote 3 best-selling books about finding his soulmate, ended up divorcing his soulmate.
Red – When I read your description of the guy, I said to myself “dollars to donuts he’s no longer with the (original) soul-mate.”
Yup. She wanted to “settle down”, and he wanted to keep “mobile”, or something like that. I read the statement on his website – which I will track down for my next bunch of posts.
the reason why leslie and richard divorced is precisely because they are soul mates, and soul mates are there for us for a reason / season, and thus many side tracks are possible, many temptations to see if we can indeed stay true to our twin flame – that one being in the world we are cojoined with spiritually.
no one who has not experienced it will ustand, and no one who has not paid the price for it will ever achieve it.
Dude, I paid the price myself. And for me, the price was way too high.
It is the very tone of your comment – its hoity-toity superiority – that goes so up my ass, in terms of the soulmate guru contingency.