Soulmates

5th December 2025

The "you complete me" fantasy sounds romantic. It is also, thankfully, impossible — and if it weren't, it would be terrifying.

The longing for a soulmate is a nostalgic one. It reaches back toward an imagined early state: the infant who was everything to their caregiver, where neither seemed to want for anything beyond the other. A perfect, self-sufficient whole, sealed against lack. Lacan calls this the imaginary — the register of unity, completeness, the mirror image that appears to give back a coherent self.

It is seductive precisely because it was never quite real, even then. The fantasy dissolves — as it must — the moment the infant registers that the caregiver has other desires. She is absent sometimes. She is elsewhere, wanting something the infant is not. This is the inaugural wound: the discovery that we are not the centre of the universe, that the Other is not wholly ours. It is also, paradoxically, the moment our own desire is born. Because it is only in the gap — in the space between what we want and what we can have — that desire finds its footing. Subjectivity, the self as a desiring being, emerges precisely from that loss of imaginary fusion.

The soulmate fantasy is a defence against what this loss left behind: the permanently open question of the Other's desire. What else do youwant? What am I to you, really? These are not questions that can be answered once and for all, and they are a source of genuine anxiety. The fantasy that a partner could perfectly meet our needs is an attempt to close that question down.

But here is the paradox. If they truly met all our needs, how could we desire them? And if we truly met all of theirs, how could they desire us? Desire requires a remainder. The very incompleteness the soulmate fantasy tries to abolish is what keeps love alive.