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The short answer: you cannot test whether someone is your soulmate. The largest study ever run on this shows why. A partner's personality and traits predicted almost nothing about how good the relationship was. What predicted it was what each person noticed happening between them, and that part you can check tonight.
What actually predicts whether a relationship is good
A 2020 project led by the psychologist Samantha Joel did something nobody had the resources to do before. Her team pooled 43 separate long-running studies of couples from 29 research labs and ran the whole pile through a machine learning model. That is 11,196 couples, 22,163 people, and 2,413 different things measured at the start. Then they asked the blunt version of your question: out of everything psychologists have ever thought to measure, what predicts how good a relationship is?
The answer was not kind to the soulmate idea. What did the heavy lifting was each person's own read on the relationship: how committed they thought their partner was, how appreciated they felt, how satisfied they believed their partner to be, how much conflict there was. Together those explained roughly 45 percent of how satisfied someone was. Personality and traits, the things you would actually use to decide whether somebody is the one, explained about 21 percent. And the partner's own answers added almost nothing on top. Your private reading of the relationship predicted two to four times more than theirs did.
Read that again, because it is the whole piece. Not one variable in that model described the partner as a person and did real work. The signal lived in the space between two people. It was never sitting inside either of them.
| What was measured | How much it explained | What that means at home |
|---|---|---|
| Your read on the relationship: perceived partner commitment, appreciation, perceived partner satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, conflict | About 45 percent | Whether you feel chosen and valued on an ordinary week |
| Who each of you is: personality, attachment style, life satisfaction, depression, negative affect | About 21 percent | The traits you would put on a dating profile |
| What your partner said about themselves and the relationship | Little on top of your own answers | Their private opinion moved the number less than your daily experience of them |
| Anything that predicted which couples would improve or decline later | Nothing reliable | No model in the study could call the future |
The seven signs that hold up
So here is the honest version of the list you came for. Six of the seven come straight out of the predictors that survived that analysis. The seventh comes from a separate line of work on what people do with each other's good news. They are ordered by how much weight the research puts on them, which is not the same as how romantic they sound.
| The sign | What it looks like on an ordinary Tuesday | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| You can feel that they are committed | You are not privately calculating whether they would stay if things got hard | Strongest single predictor in the Joel analysis |
| You feel appreciated, specifically | They thank you for something you actually did, not for existing | Second strongest |
| You believe they are satisfied too | You are not performing to keep them happy | Third strongest |
| The physical side works for both of you | Neither of you is quietly keeping score | Fourth strongest |
| Conflict is small enough to survive | You argue, and then you eat dinner | Less conflict predicted higher quality; no conflict was never the target |
| They turn toward you when you reach for them | You say something about the dog and they look up | Gottman's newlywed follow-up |
| Good news gets real interest | You tell them you got the thing and they ask three questions | Gable's work on capitalization |
The measure at the top of that list is perceived partner commitment. Perceived. Not stated, not promised, not a ring. What the study tracked is whether you believe it, and belief gets built out of small checkable things: plans made without hedging, your name used in the future tense, the ordinary Tuesday where nobody has to be asked twice. This cuts both ways, and it is worth saying plainly. If you feel it and they have never once put it into words, that gap is a conversation to have. It is not a conclusion to draw.
The measure at the top of that list is perceived partner commitment. Perceived. Not stated, not promised, not a ring. What the study tracked is whether you believe it, and belief gets built out of small checkable things: plans made without hedging, your name used in the future tense, the ordinary Tuesday where they do not have to be asked. This cuts both ways, and it is worth saying. If you feel it and they have never put it into words, that gap is a conversation to have, not a conclusion to draw.
Appreciation ranked near the top, and it is the only thing on the list that one person can shift on their own by Thursday. Specificity is the whole trick. "You're amazing" is a compliment about a trait, and it slides straight off. "Thank you for calling the landlord, I had been dreading it" is a receipt for a real act, and it lands because it proves you were paying attention. If you want the long form of that, a love letter they will actually keep is appreciation with a date on it.
Appreciation ranked near the top, and it is the only item on the list that one person can change on their own by Thursday. The trick is specificity. "You're amazing" is a compliment about a trait and it slides off. "Thank you for calling the landlord, I had been dreading it" is a receipt for a real act, and it lands because it proves you were paying attention. If you want the long form of that, a love letter they will actually keep is appreciation with a date on it.
John Gottman followed newlywed couples and checked back six years later. The couples still together had turned toward each other's small everyday attempts at attention about 86 percent of the time. The couples who had divorced managed about 33 percent. I want to be careful with those two numbers. They come from the Gottman Institute's own account of that follow-up rather than from a paper I can hand you, so take them as a strong signal and not as a settled effect size. The idea underneath is solid, and it is small enough to act on tonight. Couples who protect this deliberately, including the ones doing it across time zones with a handful of standing rituals, are practising exactly this and usually do not call it that.
John Gottman followed newlywed couples and checked back six years later. The couples still together had turned toward each other's small everyday attempts at attention about 86 percent of the time. The couples who had divorced managed about 33 percent. I want to be careful with those two numbers: they come from the Gottman Institute's own account of that follow-up rather than from a paper I can hand you, so treat them as a strong signal and not as a settled effect size. The idea underneath them is solid, and it is small enough to act on. Couples who protect this deliberately, including the ones doing it across time zones with a handful of standing rituals, are practising exactly this.
The belief that quietly works against you
There is a second finding here, and it is about the word rather than the person. In 1998 the psychologist C. Raymond Knee showed that people carry one of two quiet assumptions about love. Destiny beliefs say two people either are or are not right for each other. Growth beliefs say a relationship is something you build. Neither is stupid. Under stress, though, they behave nothing alike. In Knee's longitudinal work, destiny believers whose relationships started well stayed longer. Destiny believers who hit early trouble left sooner, and were likelier to cope by avoiding the problem entirely.
A 2014 study by Spike Lee and Norbert Schwarz came at this from a completely different angle, much smaller and much sharper. They stopped 73 people on the street in Ann Arbor, Michigan, every one of them at least six months into a relationship, and had them read a short list of ordinary phrases. Half saw unity phrases: we are one, my better half, made for each other. Half saw journey phrases: we have walked together, look how far we have come. Then everybody wrote down two things they had recently fought about, or two things they had celebrated, and rated how satisfied they were with their relationship.
The people primed with unity language and then asked to recall fights rated their relationships lower than the people primed with journey language, by a margin the authors put at just under a full standard deviation. Recalling celebrations produced no difference at all. Satisfaction with life in general did not move either. The frame only bit when there was a conflict for it to interpret.
That is the trap sitting inside the word soulmate. It is a unity frame. On a good week it costs you nothing at all. In an argument it quietly hands you a second and much worse question stacked on top of the first: not just are we okay, but were we ever right. Sixty-four analysed participants in one American city is not proof, and I would not rebuild your vocabulary on it. It lines up with Knee, though. And it names something people describe to me all the time without having a word for it.
What none of this can tell you
The Joel team was straightforward about the limit of their own work, and it is a big one. Their models could describe which relationships were good at the moment of measurement. They could not predict which ones would get better or worse. Change in relationship quality turned out to be largely unpredictable from any combination of the self-report measures they had. They had 2,413 of them.
Second, nearly all of it is self-report. People filling in scales about their own relationship, not researchers watching couples in a room. The authors flagged that themselves and asked for observational data to be tested against it. So these seven signs are seven things you can notice, which is genuinely useful. They are not seven things a stranger could verify about you.
Third, the framing study is small, and it is a priming study, a genre that has taken real damage over the past decade. Sixty-four analysed participants, one city, one sitting. I have kept it because it is specific and because it predicts something you can test on yourself. Not because it settles anything.
And none of it touches the question you actually came here with. Nothing in the literature identifies a person as a soulmate, because the field has no such variable. It has variables about what happens between two people. If you were hoping for a test that returns a yes, the honest answer is that the test does not exist. The reason turns out to be more useful than the test would have been.
What to check this week
Three things, none of which need a conversation about the relationship first. I would run them in this order, and I would not tell anyone I was doing it.
- Count bids for three days. Every time your partner opens a small loop, reading something out, touching your arm, asking whether you saw the thing, note whether you closed it. Do not fix anything yet. Just count. Most people who try this land near two thirds, which is enough to keep a relationship running and nowhere near enough to make it feel warm.
- Say one specific thank you a day for four days. Name the act, not the trait. This is the only one of the seven you can move without anyone else's cooperation, which is why I would start here if the week has been rough.
- Test what happens to good news. Next time something goes right for you, tell them and count the follow-up questions. In Shelly Gable's 2004 work on how couples handle each other's good news, an enthusiastic, curious response was linked to higher intimacy and higher daily satisfaction. Polite acknowledgement was not.
None of this will tell you whether they are your soulmate. It will tell you what kind of week the two of you are having, which turns out to be the thing that was being measured all along. If it has been a bad week, that is information about a week. Repairing it properly matters more than deciding what it means. And if what you came for was language for the feeling rather than a measurement of it, the soulmate quotes collection is the better page, and I say that without any embarrassment.
Methodology
Four papers and one institute page carry this piece. Here is what each one is, and what I left out of it.
- Joel and colleagues, 2020, in PNAS. 43 dyadic longitudinal datasets from 29 labs, 11,196 couples, 22,163 people, 2,413 baseline measures, tracked across an average of four timepoints over 14 months. Random forests. Relationship-specific variables explained about 45 percent of baseline satisfaction; individual differences about 21 percent; change over time was not predictable at all.
- Knee, 1998, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper that introduced destiny and growth beliefs and the scale that measures them. I have described the direction of its findings and deliberately not quoted an effect size, because I could not read its full methods section without a paywall.
- Lee and Schwarz, 2014, in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Study 1 recruited 73 people on the street and analysed 64 of them. Two further studies primed the same frames with physical cues instead of phrases and found the same pattern.
- Gable and colleagues, 2004, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The capitalization research behind the good-news test in the list above.
- The 86 and 33 percent figures come from the Gottman Institute's own account of Gottman's newlywed follow-up rather than from a paper I read end to end, which is why they sit outside the ranked list of predictors.
Questions people actually ask
- Can you have more than one soulmate?
The research has nothing to say about this, because it does not use the category at all. What it does say is that the qualities people describe as soulmate qualities are properties of a relationship, and a relationship can be built more than once. - Is it a bad sign that we argue?
No. Conflict showed up as a predictor in the direction you would expect, less being better, but zero was never the target and no study rewards a couple for never disagreeing. What Gottman's work tracks is what happens afterwards. - Does instant chemistry mean anything?
It means you had instant chemistry. Knee's work suggests that people who read that feeling as proof of destiny stay longer when things go well, and leave faster when they do not. - Should I stop calling my partner my soulmate?
Not on my account. Notice when you reach for it, though. Lee and Schwarz found the unity frame only hurt in the presence of a conflict, so the word costs nothing on a good day and asks a harder question on a bad one. - What if I check these seven and most of them are missing?
Then you have a description of the present, not a verdict. Six of the seven are things two people do, which means they can be started. If you have raised it and nothing moves, that is also information.
