In a nutshell, you don’t.

This idea that there is a single perfect soulmate for each one of us in the whole universe has been floated quite often, not only in romantic comedies. And being close to St Valentine’s we thought we would investigate this issue, and give those of you searching for a partner the hard, cold facts.

This question is one tackled thoroughly by Randall Munroe (previously a roboticist for NASA) in his excellent and entertaining book What if (Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions).

What if we did have one (randomly-assigned) perfect soulmate, and we could not be happy with anyone else? Would we find each other? Your soulmate is decided randomly at your birth, you know nothing about who they are or where they are but as soon as your grace falls on them you will recognise they are The One.

Sit down, I have some bad news. To start with, your soulmate is probably dead (sorry!).  Out of a hundred billion or so humans who have ever lived, only seven billion are alive now.  Moreover, we need to consider that your soulmate may not be born yet!

So let us assume that your soulmate lives in this contemporary age. Let us also assume that they are somehow in your same age gap (within a few years of your age). With this restriction, you roughly have a pool of half a billion potential matches (worldwide).

Since we are using the concept of a random soulmate, we ignore race, gender, culture, sexual orientation and language and abide by the principle that you only identify your soulmate when you look them in the eyes.

The odds of running into your soulmate are small. A generous estimate is that you meet a few dozen strangers every day. If 10 per cent are in your age group, that is 50,000 people in a lifetime.  Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soulmates, it means you will only find true love in one lifetime out of 10,000. That is a lot of left swipes on Tinder!

Source: https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/

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