Sixty percent of American adults say they believe in soulmates, according to a 2021 YouGov poll of nearly 15,000 U.S. adults, with belief running higher among women (64%) than men (55%). It’s a comforting idea: somewhere out there is one specific person built to complete you, and the job of dating is simply finding them. Researchers at BYU’s Wheatley Institute think that comforting idea is exactly what’s quietly wrecking a lot of relationships before they get the chance to become anything real. Their research draws a hard line between believing in fate and believing in effort, and it turns out that line predicts a lot more about a couple’s future than most people assume.
Two very different questions couples ask themselves
Jason S. Carroll, associate director of the Wheatley Institute and a professor in BYU’s School of Family Life, along with co-researchers Adam Galovan of the University of Alberta and David Schramm of Utah State University, describe the divide in their report, “The Soulmate Trap.” Someone operating from a soulmate belief is constantly, if quietly, asking “is this the right person?” — measuring a partner against a pre-existing ideal and treating any mismatch as evidence they haven’t found The One yet. Someone operating from what Carroll calls a growth or “only-one” belief asks a completely different question: “how can we strengthen this?” That person treats the relationship as something built through shared effort rather than something either discovered intact or abandoned as a mistake.
The couples who actually thrive skew growth, not fate
The Wheatley team’s research surveyed 615 couples, 1,230 individuals total, across the United States and Canada, and the gap between the two mindsets showed up in the numbers. Couples who scored high on relationship connection — the growth-oriented pairs — reported nearly three times higher commitment scores and nearly three times higher personal virtue scores than lower-connection couples, along with three times higher scores on proactive relationship behavior, almost double the score on communication and problem-solving, and more than double the reported life satisfaction. None of that means soulmate believers can’t have good relationships. It means the belief itself isn’t doing any of the actual work of keeping two people together; the couples who go looking for problems to fix, rather than checking a partner against a fantasy, are the ones building something durable.
Why the soulmate mindset produces paralysis, not clarity
Carroll has also written for the Institute for Family Studies about how the soulmate framework plays out in real dating life, where it tends to show up as constant low-grade evaluation rather than actual connection. Instead of getting to know a partner as a flawed, specific human being, someone chasing a soulmate is often comparing that person against an internal checklist, watching for the moment the fit feels wrong so they can move on to searching again. It’s a mindset built for early dating anxiety and short-term compatibility apps, not for the years of ordinary friction that any long relationship eventually has to survive.
Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, has argued that this soulmate-first approach to marriage may already be losing ground, predicted to decline as economic pressure pushes younger adults toward more pragmatic reasons for partnering up: shared financial stability, shared labor, shared long-term planning. Carroll’s own research suggests that shift would actually be good news for relationship quality, not a sign of settling. Treating a partnership as something two people construct together, rather than something one of them is lucky enough to stumble into, appears to be the belief system that survives contact with an actual, imperfect, twenty-year marriage.
There’s a practical version of this couples can actually use without waiting on new research to convince them. Carroll’s framework suggests swapping the evaluative question for the constructive one in ordinary moments of friction: not “is this still right,” but “what does this actually need from us right now.” That single reframe changes what a disagreement means. Under a soulmate lens, conflict reads as a warning sign, evidence the match might be wrong after all. Under a growth lens, the same conflict just reads as the next problem on the list, the kind every long relationship generates and gets through.
The soulmate idea isn’t going away, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting a relationship that feels like fate. But the research is fairly blunt about which belief predicts a couple still choosing each other a decade in: not the one who found the right person, but the one who decided, repeatedly, to become the right partner.
