Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle!

We’ve spent the last three weeks letting Gregory Stock slowly dismantle my self-image through a series of escalating bargains involving starving children and my internet connection. This week, he puts down the rhetorical sledgehammer and asks something a little more personal. Less about what you’d give up for the world, and more about what kind of life you actually want to live inside of.

The question: Which would you rather have — one intimate soul mate but no other good friends, or no soul mate but lots of good friends?

It sounds like a personality quiz question at first. The kind of thing you answer in thirty seconds and move on. But the longer you sit with it, the more it starts to pull at some genuinely interesting threads — about what we believe relationships are for, about what kind of loneliness we’re most afraid of, and about whether the premise of the question is even built on solid ground.

Let’s get into it.

First, We Need to Talk About Soul Mates

Before I can answer which I’d rather have, I have to be honest about something: I don’t actually believe in soul mates.

I know that’s not a universally popular position. The soul mate concept has a deep and persistent hold on the cultural imagination. It shows up in romantic comedies and ancient philosophy alike — Plato’s Symposium gives us the idea that humans were once whole beings split in two, doomed to spend their lives searching for their other half. It’s a beautiful story. It is also, I’m fairly confident, a story.

The soul mate framework asks you to believe that somewhere out there — or possibly already in your life — there exists one specific person who is cosmically designated to complete you. One person whose presence resolves the essential loneliness of being human. One person without whom you are, by definition, incomplete.

I find this idea romantic in the abstract and somewhat troubling in practice. Because what it actually does, if you take it seriously, is put an enormous and unfair amount of pressure on any single relationship. It transforms another person into a solution to an existential problem, rather than a companion you’ve chosen and continue to choose. It suggests that connection is something that happens to you — fated, destined, written somewhere in the architecture of the universe — rather than something you build, deliberately and imperfectly, over time.

And practically speaking, the soul mate model has a pretty rough track record. People who find their supposed soul mate and then lose them — through death, divorce, estrangement — are left not just grieving a person, but grieving the entire framework of meaning they built around that person’s existence in their life. That’s a particular kind of devastation. It seems structurally avoidable.

So when Stock asks me if I’d rather have a soul mate or good friends, my first instinct is to raise my hand and say I don’t think that first option is actually on the table. But in the spirit of engaging with the question as asked, I’ll stipulate that a soul mate, for these purposes, means one person with whom you share a depth of intimacy and understanding that you simply don’t have with anyone else. One person who knows you completely. One person who is, by every measure, your person.

Even with that generous definition in place, I still know my answer. But let’s think through what each option actually costs you before we get there.

What It Would Actually Cost You

The soul mate option sounds romantic until you map out what a day — or a year — actually looks like inside of it.

You have one person. One person to call when something good happens. One person to sit with when something terrible does. One person whose perspective you get on every decision, every crisis, every ordinary Tuesday evening when you just need to talk to somebody. That’s an enormous amount of weight for one relationship to carry, and I think it would eventually warp the relationship under the pressure of it.

Friendships distribute the load. Different friends carry different parts of you. There are people I talk to about certain things that I would never bring to others, not because I trust them less but because they’re equipped differently. The friend who will sit with you in the hard stuff. The friend who will make you laugh about it until the hard stuff shrinks back to a manageable size. The friend who has known you since you were a different person and keeps that earlier version of you alive just by remembering it. You can’t really get all of that from one source, no matter how intimate that source is.

On the other side: what does it cost you to have lots of good friends and no soul mate? Primarily, I think, depth. The singular experience of being truly, completely known by another person. Of having a relationship that has accumulated so much shared history and mutual understanding that it functions almost like a second self. That’s real. That’s valuable. And it’s different in kind from what even very close friendships tend to offer.

But I’ll take breadth over that particular depth. Not because depth doesn’t matter, but because I think the soul mate model asks you to build your entire relational life on one load-bearing column, and that seems like a structurally questionable way to live.

The Introvert/Extrovert Wrinkle

I suspect this question lands very differently depending on where you sit on the introvert-to-extrovert spectrum, and I think that’s worth naming.

If you are someone who finds social interaction primarily draining — who needs solitude to recover, who maintains a small number of close relationships by design rather than by default — the soul mate option might genuinely appeal. One person who gets you completely, and then quiet. That’s not an unreasonable vision of a good life for a certain kind of person.

If you’re someone who is energized by a wide web of connection, who processes the world through conversation with many different people, who shows up differently in different friendships and finds something valuable in each version of yourself that gets expressed — the friends option is probably a pretty easy call.

I am, for the record, somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, but closer to the introverted end than most people probably assume. I like people (sometimes). I like a good conversation. But I also require significant amounts of time that belong entirely to me. And I’ve found, in practice, that I do better with a smaller number of genuinely close friendships than with a large, diffuse social network where nobody really knows me that well. So you might think I’d be drawn to the soul mate option.

But I keep coming back to the single point of failure problem. One relationship. No backup. No distribution of weight. If that relationship changes — and all relationships change — you are alone in a way that is entirely different from ordinary solitude. That’s not a risk I’d be comfortable taking, even as someone who generally prefers depth over breadth in my social life.

What the Choice Actually Reveals

Here’s what I think Stock is really after with this one, underneath the surface of the question: he wants to know what you believe relationships are fundamentally for.

If you believe the primary purpose of a close relationship is to be completely known — to have one person who holds the full unedited version of you and accepts it — then the soul mate option makes sense. Everything else is secondary to that singular experience of being seen.

If you believe the primary purpose of relationships is accompaniment — having people who show up for the different chapters of your life, who fill different roles, who cover different kinds of ground — then the friends option reflects that. It’s a more distributed, less mythologized vision of what connection is and how it works.

I am clearly in the second camp. I believe relationships are primarily about accompaniment, not completion. I don’t think there’s a missing half of me out there somewhere. I think I’m a reasonably whole person who is made richer — not made whole — by the people I choose to let in. And I’d rather have several of those people than one perfect, irreplaceable one.

It’s possible this makes me a romantic pessimist. It’s also possible it makes me a romantic realist. Either way, it’s where I land.

My Answer

Lots of good friends. No hesitation.

I’d miss the idea of the soul mate in the same way I sometimes miss the idea of things that turned out not to be real — with some wistfulness, and then I’d get on with it. The friends would be there. They’d make me laugh. They’d show up. They’d carry the parts of the load they were each built to carry.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s a pretty good life.

Your Turn

I want to know which way you went on this one, and I especially want to know why.

Did the soul mate option call to you? If so, what does that say about what you’re looking for from the people in your life? And do you actually believe in soul mates — the real, fated, cosmically designated version — or is it more of a useful shorthand for a particular kind of deep relationship?

Or are you with me in the friends camp, and if so, is it because of something specific about how your relationships have actually worked in your life?

Drop your answer in the comments. I promise I’ll read every one of them, which is easier to do when you don’t have to share your internet connection with a thousand hypothetical children.

Until next week, this is Aaron, still here at The Confusing Middle, still letting Gregory Stock ask the questions I didn’t know I needed to answer.