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Notes -
This is definitely not in the set of "lies that improve the outcome if everyone pretends they are true". It can mislead people into:
bombingat first sight, right?)I once saw this summarized most succinctly as "every woman I know who thinks there is such a thing as a "soulmate" is still single".
The converse of this doesn't have to be some sort of heartless "Sexual Market Value is a commodity and you should upgrade whenever you find a better deal" antithesis philosophy, though. Perhaps the best way to express the synthesis here is "soul mates aren't just found, they're made".
The phrase "sexual market value" does seem to reek of commodification and oversimplification, but ... we still talk about "the housing market" despite the word "the" being something of a misnomer, right? Even if two people have exactly the same budget for housing: One person can place more value on proximity to big city amenities and another on proximity to rural open space. One can place more value on square footage and separation and another on neighborhood density and walkability. One can place more value on modernist style and another on history. Etc. etc. We still try to quantify the point where supply meets demand with a single cash value, although doing this is a full time real estate appraiser job ... and once a place is sold, it's not likely to be resold just because the local relative price goes up a few percent to pay the agents' fees, is it? When people own a home they put a lot of effort into moving everything in, redecorating and repainting and landscaping and even renovating it to suit their tastes, setting down roots in the neighborhood and the city, etc. etc. People will notoriously hang on to a specific house that might have become suboptimal for them based on their original less-individual criteria, because of the "memories it now holds" or just "to keep it in the family".
Love is kind of like a much more extreme and two-sided version of that sort of attachment. Both people do have to bring something to the table from the start, and there are a lot of romantically valuable qualities that are nearly universal, and none of that should be ignored because it seems impersonal to do so. But exactly what sort of "something" is most valuable is still somewhat personal and subjective, such that even if you can say "he's a 6" and "he's an 8" in some sort of "averaged over all partners' preferences" sense, it shouldn't be surprising to see the "6" end up with an "8" and the "8" with a "6" and all four people thrilled by the results. And despite the common phrase "end up with", that's never the end, right? Even simply dating causes attachment to grow, helps people to get better attuned to teach other, and helps people find out who they're already attuned with in less obvious ways (sometimes you really don't "just click"), ideally reaching the point where even a "10-to-average-partners" can't compete with an "11-to-me" ... and marriage and kids aren't simply an epilogue to that process, they're an accelerant. In the end you do end up with a soul mate, not because you found the one Out There Waiting For You, but because both of you made yourselves and made each other that way.
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