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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I spent a few years working in a developing country where a significant portion of the population lives in grinding poverty, and even in the middle and upper classes, most people are paired up in marriages arranged by their families, often between cousins.  It's an honor-shame culture in which divorce is often not permitted by families of the woman even in cases of domestic violence, and women are honor-killed with some regularity.  Domestic violence is common and seemed to be accepted by many people.  I had a colleague who was educated in the West and successful in her career, but married to a man who, every few months or so, would beat her violently.  She stayed with him and while she would complain about his abuse, between batterings she spoke of him and their family as if it were normal.  We had one deep conversation once where I asked her, after a beating, why she didn't just leave, and she said that when he first started beating her early in their marriage, she had asked her parents to go home and they said that if she did, they and she would be socially shunned, so no.  I pointed out that she could get a job overseas, and she said that she didn't want to separate her young son from his father because the son loved his dad so much (even though the dad beat the mom regularly).  This was really how she thought.  And I think many people in the world are in that situation.  Marriage and love are viewed very differently in many parts of the world.

And I thought a lot about how we view love and marriage in the West.  I concluded that "soulmates" are a luxury most people in the world don't even consider.

In our culture, we just have choices and the advantages of choice and education and options, but in the end, many of the love and soulmates fall apart after children.

I think that really meeting a soulmate is super rare.  We in the West are all trying to find one, but most of us don't, even if we thought we did at some point.

If beautiful and highly successful people were more likely to find soulmates, I don't think we would see so many divorces in celebrity/politician/pro athlete circles?

So maybe we all have the potential to find a soulmate, but most of us just...don't.

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Abusive people don’t find soulmates. Understanding people do. Beautiful and highly successful people are not more likely to find soulmates. They are not more likely to be understanding or abusive than anyone else.

PP, what country were you in? One country famous for abusive arranged marriages is also famous for its entrainment industry: Bollywood, with all of its love stories.

Finding love is just as worthy as earning wealth. It’s not limited to the rich. The poor find love too. Holy air ball money and beauty as the reasons why are off the mark.[/quote]

My point is that "soulmates" wasn't a concept or goal in that culture.  Some of the people were beautiful, some were highly successful; neither beauty nor success prevented them from being abusive or becoming victims of abuse.  Then again, what you and I classify as "abuse" was normalized within that culture.

Not the culture you mention, but a culture existing in the country geographically near that one.

Also, Bollywood movies are problematic in many ways: there is a pattern of the man pestering/harassing/stalking the woman, ignoring her "no" or her stated lack of interest in him, until she eventually realizes that she loves the pest/stalker who harassed her.  It's a problem with broader societal implications:

https://yaledailynews.com/sjp/2021/08/28/is-bollywood-romanticizing-harassment/
https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/banality-of-evil-why-bollywood-and-society-need-to-stop-trivialising-normalising-and-rationalising-stalking-12204232.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-24/court-told-bollywood-influenced-stalker/5620644

"Soulmates" and "love" as we understand those concepts don't exist, or are understood very differently in other cultures.  They aren't universal.  I think we are very lucky in the West to have the freedom of options and independence for women, but that's all.
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