Most of what gets written about soulmates is about feelings. The butterflies. The chemistry. The sense of knowing “from the first look.” I’ve lived in Saigon long enough to have watched a few marriages unravel around that definition, usually around year five or six, when the feelings predictably cool and one or both people decide they’ve made a mistake.
The feelings weren’t wrong. They just weren’t the thing.
The actual sign, the one the research keeps pointing to, is quieter and stranger than any of the rom-com lines we’ve absorbed. It’s what happens inside you when you slowly realise they’ve seen the version of you that you’ve spent your whole life hiding, and instead of flinching, they stayed.
Why “how they make you feel” turns out to be the wrong metric
Early-stage relationships feel amazing because novelty does a lot of the chemical work for you. New neurology, new hormones, new stories to tell. Ask anyone three months into something electric whether they’ve found their person and they’ll say yes without hesitation.
But the research on what actually holds relationships together over time tells a very different story. Decades of work by Rochester psychologist Harry Reis and his collaborators has identified something called perceived partner responsiveness as a core process underlying intimacy. In a paper from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers note that perceived partner responsiveness reliably predicts relationship intimacy and satisfaction, with effect sizes ranging from small-to-medium for intimacy up to medium-to-large for satisfaction.
That word, “responsiveness,” is doing more work than it looks. It doesn’t mean being nice to each other. It’s the specific feeling of being understood, validated, and cared for at a level that disarms you. It’s the sense that the other person actually gets you.
The thing inside us that’s actually looking for a soulmate
One of the most underrated theories in social psychology is self-verification theory, developed by William Swann at the University of Texas. Swann’s research found, across many studies and more than a dozen independent replications, that once people develop firmly held beliefs about themselves, they come to prefer that others see them as they see themselves, even when those self-views are negative. Married people with low self-views are actually more committed to spouses who view them accurately than to spouses who see them more favourably than they see themselves.
Read that again if you need to. It’s stranger than it sounds.
What it means is that the part of you scanning every important person in your life isn’t looking for the one who makes you feel best. It’s looking for the one who sees you most accurately. It wants to be known, not flattered. That’s why people who get complimented all day by acquaintances can come home and quietly crave one person who really understands why Tuesday was so hard.
The shame meeting that almost never happens
This is where it gets tender, and where I think the real work of the question lives.
Everyone carries a version of themselves they’ve hidden. A stretch of years they don’t talk about. A tendency they’re ashamed of. A fear they’ve never said out loud. A form of need that feels like too much. A history that doesn’t fit the tidy story they tell at dinner parties.
Brené Brown’s research on shame, built over two decades of qualitative work, landed on a single central observation. She defines shame as the fear of disconnection, the fear that something about who we are or what we’ve done has made us unworthy of connection. The thing that unravels closeness, more than conflict or bad communication, is the private conviction that if the other person really saw us, they’d leave.
So we hide. We curate. We show the good angles. We build a version of ourselves that’s easier to love, and we become expert performers of that version.
And then, if we’re lucky, somebody sees through it. Not through clever detective work, but through the quiet accumulation of time and attention. They see the thing we were sure would be the dealbreaker. They see it clearly. And they don’t flinch. They don’t rush to fix us. They don’t even make a big deal of it. They just stay.
What happens inside you in that moment is, I think, the closest thing to what we actually mean when we say “soulmate.” It isn’t a feeling of being swept away. It’s a feeling of being allowed to stop running.
The first time I felt it
When my wife and I first got together, I had a version of myself I was working overtime to sell her. I was the charming Australian writer in Saigon, the runner, the meditator, the guy with the growing business. That was the pitch.
About two years in, during a stretch where I was anything but impressive, she said something to me in Vietnamese that I still haven’t quite recovered from. It wasn’t romantic. It was just direct. She basically said, I see how you get when you’re scared, and I see what you do to cover it, and I’m still here.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I spent a week turning it over, trying to figure out if I wanted to run or surrender. I chose surrender. Every good thing in our marriage since has grown out of that week.
What the Buddhists understood about being seen
When I wrote Hidden Secrets of Buddhism, one of the ideas I kept circling back to is that ego isn’t pride so much as it’s the exhausting project of maintaining a version of yourself that isn’t quite true. We spend most of our waking life defending that version, from others and from ourselves. Meditation, at its simplest, is learning to set it down for a few minutes and see what’s actually underneath.
Love does something similar, but through another person’s eyes. The right partner isn’t a mirror that makes you look good. They’re a quiet, patient witness who lets you put the performance down, piece by piece, until one day you realise you’ve been living without the costume for weeks.
The sign you’re actually looking for
If you’re trying to work out whether you’ve found the right person, stop asking how they make you feel. That metric is too noisy and too easy to fake. Ask yourself this instead.
Do they know the part of you you were most afraid to show? Not the polished version. The real one. And after they saw it, did they lean in or lean away?
The ones who lean in are rare. They’re worth everything.
