Why You Won't Find A Soulmate
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Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

A lot of people who are struggling to find the one are setting an impossible expectation for their partners to meet. Meeting your soulmate does not mean happily ever after. So oftentimes when we have an anxious attachment style, what we fall in love with is not a person. We fall in love with a fantasy.

Okay.

and dive into essays about pop culture analysis of rom-com tropes and Jungian psychology about anima projection. I get a lot of male attention because of my profession and interests in male-dominated fields like gaming, but never truly feel seen. I can't seem to find anyone who loves me for who I am. I was desired, but never loved. A choice, but never the one. My guy friends don't get it.

They say, how can you call yourself a fem cell if you've been in so many relationships and have 37,000 likes on Bumble? Just because someone is attractive, to be honest, I'm not even attractive. I'm average, but my profile is pretty funny. Doesn't mean they can't face rejection or isolation. Quick aside. I don't know if you all remember this, but we did a video on female bullying and attractive women are likely to be bullies, but they are also attractive. Attractiveness as a woman also increases your risk of being bullied.

So women oftentimes bully attractive women. Attraction isn't the sole factor in building relationships, and reducing it to that misses the entire point. The woman who first coined incel wasn't fixated on appearances the way looks maxers these days are. Her goal was to talk about the difficulties in forming meaningful connections, but that's been hijacked into a superficial context today.

contest over looks and genitals and body counts and that alpha-beta-sigma stuff while i might not have difficulty attracting men the connection often feels shallow i think they don't see the real me only the fantasy they've projected onto me

Once the fantasy wears off, I am unlovable. Sometimes I feel so vengeful. I feel like every guy I've dated has just used me to level up and then discarded me, like I'm some manic pixie dream girl in some stupid male-centered rom-com. I really need to de-center men for my life, but at the same time, I just want to be loved, held, seen, and understood."

I'm caught in a tug-of-war between polarizing emotions. Each day I wake up, unsure which side will gain the upper hand, leaving me exhausted and confused. This is the longest I've been single since I was 17, and this year has been a total train wreck romantically and sexually. Recently, I went to a wedding with my older cousin's sisters, and it stirred up some childhood wounds. As a kid, I always wanted to be like them—beautiful, feminine, graceless, effortless, happy—

but I never felt like I belonged. Honestly, they're wonderful, and it's my own crap that I didn't fit in. Whole time I had thoughts like, why can't I be normal? Why can't I be happy? Teenage me tried to cope by thinking I don't fit in because I'm better than them, which is both cringy and untrue. But that was my tomboy pick-me era, and I'm ashamed of it. I did seek wisdom from them, and they empathized with me for the most part. They suggested I just shut up and go the arranged marriage route because that's where all the good men are.

But I'm so scared that I won't be happy because I'm hard to love. So if I say no to marriage and convince myself this is how it's going to be and stay single forever, am I just a fem cell or just a sad 4B? I've been spiraling a bit watching all these relationship movies. If you do a Jungian analysis on rom-coms, they fall into two camps. Anime movies, a guy with mommy issues meets a quirky girl who fixes him and then he discards her.

Animus movies like Beauty and the Beast, a woman is thrown into the Animus' world and she must befriend his toys and tools, tames the beast and becomes the mistress of the house. It's depressing how the women, even after they find their man, never really get a happy ending. They always either get pregnant and die in childbirth or get discarded after the male protagonist finds himself.

Why does female self-isolation always end in codependency? Why do women lose their friends every time they start a new relationship? My anxious attachment style is ruining my life, and I'm trying to work on it, and it's hard. I've been chronically depressed for the past 1.5 years. I do have a therapist, psychiatrist, hobbies, and a supportive family, but I can't seem to escape the cycle of limerence, codependency, and isolation.

I need to decenter men from my life, but loving fiercely is my thing, and I'm not afraid of heartbreak. Rewatch Fleabag, and it has this quote. I think you know how to love better than any of us. That's why you find it all so painful. Women are born with the pain built in. I used to be a hopeless romantic until my soulmate dumped me for being depressed. Now I don't believe in soulmates, and life sucks, so yay.

Everything I miss about my exes wasn't there in the first place. Where are the good men? Better yet, how do I stop giving a damn about finding one? I want peace, feminine wisdom, and more female friends. Okay. So I think the first thing to understand about

finding a healthy relationship is that it takes time. There's a learning curve, right? So I think the biggest mistake that we make is that we assume that we're looking for a person. Where are all of the good men? This is something that I hear so much. As if finding the right man

results in the right relationship. That is not what makes a good relationship. It's not finding something that is perfect. Although this too gets propagated by our media and things like that. You find the one, you fall in love. I personally believe in soulmates. Like I think that's legit. But meeting your soulmate does not mean happily ever after. Happily ever after is what you build with the soulmate.

It is what you become. It is what they become. It is the growth that happens once you meet your soulmate. See, this is a huge problem that we make, especially with dating. We make all of these associations. We make this chain of causation.

And that's really where the problem is. Finding the good men isn't the problem. It is about once you have the good man or once you find the good man, how do you change? How do you make the relationship work? How do you encourage them to change? How do you encourage them to become even better? That's where all the money is. Finding the person, meeting the person, the initial thing with that person is actually a very small interaction, maybe five minutes.

Maybe a little bit longer with texting nowadays. I don't know. Right. So you can look, but the encounter with the person is very short lived. But then the relationship is something that takes years. So I'd say that like this business with relationship, the mistake that we make is we think I need to find the right seed to grow the right fruit tree.

And that's true, right? You need the right seed to grow the right fruit tree. But finding the seed is just the first necessary step to growing the tree. Then the tree actually needs to be fostered. The seed needs to be planted. We need to break, we need to till the soil, plant the seed. So I think a big problem that a lot of people don't like, this rubs them the wrong way,

is you may find your soulmate, but what is the ground that that seed is going into? What is your receptivity to that soulmate? I had a couple of uncompassionate thoughts when I read this post. And I'm going to share those, and they're given with compassion. But I've worked with people who wouldn't even know love when they saw it.

When I see anxious attachment style, when I see projection, when I see these kinds of things, this is honestly a problem. When you have an anxious attachment style, love can look very scary. This person also mentions limerence. This is a problem. So oftentimes when we have an anxious attachment style, when we have a predilection towards limerence, what we fall in love with is not a person. It's not a human person.

We fall in love with a fantasy. We fall in love with an idea. And when we spend our time looking at Jungian analysis of tropes, that is not reality. There's absolutely value to it, and there are archetypes in it. But even if we look at what this person says, it's like, I mean, this is where you got to be like really careful because...

You know, they're talking about where he discards her in the end, and then she dies pregnant in childbirth, or they get discarded after the male protagonist finds himself. What about all the people who don't die in childbirth? Right? It's kind of weird. There's such a selection bias here. There's a selection bias of the kind of people that this person is meeting, being in a male-dominated field. Right? They're finding all the wrong men. There's a selection bias. Who's writing Jungian essays about tropal analysis? Right?

What is their attachment style? What is their experience? It doesn't always end like this. And in fact, I would say that if you look at it like really statistically, forget about Jungian analysis of tropes. In fiction, which all of these things are fiction, by the way, right?

If you look at the real world, what do you see? Most stories don't end like this. Most stories, I think like 50% of people get divorced. 50% of people stay together. Like dying in childbirth. Childbirth is, I think, statistically the most dangerous thing that a woman will ever do. And the majority of women survive. Like the vast majority of women survive. So I think this is where we have to be really, really careful about whether we are actually ready to receive...

what we are looking for. Very important in dating. And I don't mean to say that all of the blame is on you. I mean, I think there's a lot of misogynistic crap on the internet, but that is another issue that we should get into. So what I've noticed with almost all of these posts is that they start with my experience on the internet. So I know this sounds kind of staggering, but I have a question for y'all.

what percentage of people on the planet know what an incel is? So I'll talk to psychiatrist colleagues of mine and I'll be like, yeah, I do a lot of work with incels. And they're like, what is that? My kids, friends, parents, literally over this winter holiday, I probably talked to about 20 people. One person knew who an incel was. So this is something that if you're like in dating and stuff, and I think this person, I love this post because the person has so much self-awareness.

They're absolutely moving in the right direction. They're able to find a lot of things that are going on in their life, maybe an attachment style issue. They notice themselves going down the rabbit hole. This is like the one corner of the internet that I'm so proud of because they say, I'm turning, I can see it happening. I'm turning into a fem cell. How do I stop? Right? Everywhere else, they're either not fem cells or they've already become fem cells. The communities of these people are not in the metamorphosis phase, right?

They're post-metamorphosis. So it's brilliant. This is awesome. Like this person has such incredible insight that you see this happening, then you can do something about it. So the first thing that I'm going to say, and this is going to be kind of tough, but I want y'all to think about this.

If I want a healthy body, what determines the health of the body that I make? So a healthy body, if we look at it at its core, if I want a body that does not have anemia, if I want a body that lives...

At the minimum, I need calories and water. If I want to avoid... If we look at why bodies fall apart, sometimes we inherit things like genes for cystic fibrosis. That's what makes an unhealthy body. But oftentimes, for most people, if we look at in the United States, healthy bodies, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes are caused by our diet and less so by exercise. But exercise is important too. Diet and exercise. So this makes very simple sense, right? So if I want to have...

You know, a sturdy house, what determines the sturdiness of the house that I build? The ingredients that I put into it. What determines the health of my body? What I put into it. This is something that a lot of people don't practically understand. What determines the healthiness of my mind? What I put into it. So if you eat a trash diet in your mind, you will have a trash mind. If I'm a part of incel forums, what do you think is going to happen in my mind?

If I'm part of an echo chamber, what happens in the echo chamber? So the biggest problem that I see that most people have is they feed their mind a diet of trash. And this person...

knows this, right? They're saying, I'm watching this YouTuber. I'm not saying that the YouTuber is trash. I have no idea what this person is or what they do or if their content is good or not good. Don't take it that way. But when we say trash diet of the mind, it's not that a particular thing is good or bad. The most important aspect of diet is variety.

Fruit is healthy. And I recently saw there was like a fruit influencer who died of malnutrition. No surprise. So it is not that a particular content creator is trash or not trash. It is the scope and breadth of content that you watch. If all you ever watch on the Internet is Dr. K and you spend a lot of time watching Dr. K on the Internet, I will be the first to say you have a trash diet. Go do something else.

So I want y'all, if your mind is not healthy, if you don't like the way that your mind is, if you don't like the thoughts that you have and the emotions that you have, the first thing that you should do is understand what are the inputs to your mind. And we know this scientifically, right? So if I grow up in a toxic and abusive household, the function of my mind will change. The way I interpret events will change. My sense of self-esteem will change.

Because I am getting these inputs. So if you want a healthy mind, you must feed it the right things. Now, what does that mean? This is where the whole touch grass thing comes from. And I know that this is kind of like people will be listening to this and they're saying, Dr. K, are you just saying I should get off the Internet and touch grass? Well, yes and no. So telling you to get off the Internet and touch grass doesn't work.

Why not? Because the parts of your brain that motivate behavior, if I just tell you, hey, you should exercise every day, that doesn't engender motivation. It doesn't engender action. Telling you what to do is not sufficient. We must tell you why you should do it. This is what creates behavioral change.

And so if you want to change your behavior and get off the Internet, what you need to do is a critical analysis of your experience, a critical analysis of what I'm saying. Then you will hopefully get off the Internet. If you internally arrive at this conclusion on your own, the likelihood of behavioral change drastically increases.

So I'm not telling you to just do anything. I'm telling you to understand. If I eat highly processed food and I get constipated, the solution is simple. I need to change what I put into my body. If you don't like the way your mind is, you need to change what you put into your mind. Now, why is this so hard? Because our mind is attracted to those things. Why is it so easy to eat processed food? Because it tastes good. The internet...

Taste delicious. All these like things on Twitter, these posts, this, I don't know, this Jungian analysis of tropes. Like, I don't know who's writing this stuff. I don't know if they understand Jungian analysis. Are they Jungian trained psychoanalysts? Probably not. Maybe they are. Who knows?

So most of the stuff on the internet is trash and it tastes really good. What does tasting really good mean? It means that it emotionally resonates with our experience. That's what we lean into, right? What does this person gravitate towards? FemCell YouTubers, Jungian Analysis.

What you eat tastes good. Same is true of the mind. This is why incel echo chambers exist. They love it there. It's like a buffet full of Twinkies. All trash, but tastes delicious. That's why they keep going back.

So when you engage with these things on the internet, ask yourself, what is it? Because see, understand this. You have something in here that feels satisfied by consuming the trash from the internet. What is that thing? What is this that you are feeding constantly? And one of two things will happen when you feed something inside of you. Either it'll go away or it'll grow. And this is the big problem with the internet is that the internet doesn't ever satisfy us.

I mean, not ever. That's not correct. It does rarely. But most of the time, the stuff that we consume on the Internet tricks our brain into satisfaction. But it doesn't fulfill our needs. So it feels good if you look at venting spaces on the Internet. People are venting, venting, venting, but I don't know if people get better. So it gives us some possibility.

It's just like highly processed food. It has calories in it, but it doesn't have micronutrients. There is a difference between calories and nutrition. And the problem with the Internet is all these companies are basing things they're competing with each other to try to offer the tastiest food. So if you look at like fast food companies, why are they so unhealthy? Because they're competing based on satisfaction with everybody else. And it's a race to the bottom. The Internet is no different.

So everyone's looking for emotional engagement. Everyone's looking for deltas. If there's a change, it's important. Person who is viewed as good did something bad all over the internet. Person who did something bad did something bad again. The mind is very sensitive. The brain is sensitive to deltas.

The brain is sensitive to emotional engagement. So these are the two things that pull us into the Internet. And when we consume this stuff over and over and over again, it changes our thinking. And the real problem is that when it comes to dating, I think like, you know, a third of the people that I've worked with, like they bring so many problems to the table and then they get frustrated when they can't find what they're looking for.

This person said, I got dumped by someone who dumped me because I was depressed. Now, there are studies that show that men have an unfortunately high predisposition of divorcing their wives when their wives get cancer. So many men unfortunately do abandon their wives when they get sick. There's data to support that. Women don't abandon their men when they get sick. Women divorce their men when they lose their job.

That's what the data shows, right? So what is, what life circumstance change increases the risk of divorce? From a woman's perspective, it's a man losing their job. From a man's perspective, it's a woman becoming unhealthy. Good people out there and bad people out there. I'm not saying that men are bad or women are bad. Everyone's an asshole for a different reason. And I've seen women that are assholes for male reasons and men that are assholes for female reasons.

The variance within a population far outweighs the variance between populations. But the key thing is, you know, someone breaking up with you because you are depressed, that can absolutely be true. And that sounds like an asshole thing to do, and in some ways it is. But I've also seen the other side of the table. What is it like to date someone who's depressed? Oftentimes the people who break up with people who are depressed, this is what I've seen as a psychiatrist,

It's not I'm breaking up with you because you're depressed. I'm breaking up with you because you are not putting in the effort to make things better. That's the common reason. But when you are depressed, it is very hard to see that nuance. It's very easy to think in black and white. I see this with addiction too.

I'm not breaking up with you because you're an addict. I'm breaking up with you because you stopped going to meetings, started hanging out with the wrong crowd. And when I told you, hey, I think you need to start going to meetings again, you told me to go screw myself and then said that everything was fine. That's why I'm breaking up with you. But what is the person going to do? They're going to say I broke up with me because I have an addiction problem.

So there's a lot of nuance here. There's a lot of subtlety. And the really challenging thing about that is when I read something like this, is that what happened? I don't know. Maybe you got depressed once and the dude was like, yeah, F this. I'm moving on. Maybe the person was an asshole emotionally available. We can't make a deterministic statement.

decision there. And we don't want to. And the reason why is because we're not just talking to that person. What happened in that circumstance is not what's important. We should understand because we're talking about scale, right? We should understand the scope and range of things that are possible. Are dudes likely to dump their girlfriends because they get depressed? Absolutely. Could you have been an unfortunate victim of that circumstance? Absolutely.

and what can you do about it? So I'd say first thing, and the internet is full of toxic misogyny, but it is also, there are pockets of very, very good male attitudes. So the most positive communities that I have participated in and or watched tend to be dudes talking about cooking, most positivity. That's where the good men are. They're the ones who are talking about and are devoted to

grilling and gardening, but you go to a relationship advice community? You go to anything related to explicit gender? Why is that? It's because the people who go there, there's like a selection bias.

Right? Who's hanging out talking about relationships on the internet? A lot of good people, I'm sure. I hang out in those too. I'm a bad person. But most of the people in healthy relationships are not hanging around relationship advice places.

They're out living their relationship. And this is the real problem with the Internet, is that the selection bias is so strong. And the selection bias is made worse by the algorithmic nature. Once your browser, once your Reddit account, once your YouTube algorithm knows what you like, it will serve you up more and more and more of it. And then the diet in your mind, it's kind of like this is what the Internet is like, and it's really scary.

Imagine a world where if you go to a fast food restaurant, half of the grocery stores in your area get replaced with fast food restaurants. And each time you go to a fast food restaurant, other places disappear and are replaced by fast food restaurants. What would your diet become over time? How much dedicated effort? Now I have to drive 90 kilometers to find a grocery store.

This is what the Internet does. This is why everyone has a trash diet of the mind. It is a dynamic landscape where it's a race to the bottom. So when things are like when we're prioritizing crappiness and highly processed trash and the world is so dynamic, this is what the world becomes.

So this person is doing, in a lot of ways, like, all the right things. They have a psychiatrist. They have a therapist. They're aware that they have an anxious attachment style. And if y'all are looking for wondering where all the good men are and you have not done all of this work, this is where you should start. Not that everyone needs to go to therapy, but it's worth trying.

And the last thing to consider is that when you see the world a particular way, this is what's really hard to understand. The world that you see is disconnected from the world that exists because your perception matters a lot, right? So like, and this is what's really challenging, especially when we've got these limerence kind of things where this person says, you know, people find me attractive, but I'm never the one. And so when I work with people who struggle with dating, I'll ask them,

What does that practically look like? How would you know? And what I tend to find is that a lot of people who are struggling to find the one and who are looking for the one are setting an impossible expectation for their partners to meet. I want to be loved completely and totally. What does that look like? If I was a robot examining your interactions, how would I be able to judge that?

Give me a scorecard. What does true love look like? And over what span of time? Are you giving people the time to grow and change? How are they supposed to know what true love means to you? Oftentimes, we set telepathic standards for our partners. This is what true love means to me. Where is your vision of true love coming from? It's coming from what you consume.

Like, I can't imagine how difficult it must be if a dude is dating you and you're doing, you know, Jungian analysis of rom-com tropes. And this is somehow creating a standard in your mind that you're expecting this fucking guy who's playing League of Legends to meet? Like, bro, really hard. And that's what's so tricky about this is that the truth is that, like, it's somewhere in the middle of all of this crap.

Are there dudes out there who are assholes? Yes. Will dudes out there look at you and project on you their own limerent object, right? Are they going to look at you and see this manic pixie girl? Yes, that happens. But when you look at them, do you see the human object?

Or do you see your limerent object, this romantic figure from Beauty and the Beast, who is even more fantastical than Beauty and the Beast? Because in fiction, every man is not good enough and every woman suffers. If that is the standard of what happens in fiction, what are you expecting from the real world? And this is why it's hard to form connection. Connection doesn't happen between two fantasies.

It doesn't happen between Edward Cullen and Manic Pixie Girl. It happens between two real people. And so the tricky thing, the reason that I'm careful about this stuff, I'm acknowledging, you know, if someone is in a vulnerable state and I say things like this,

You have to be careful because what I'm saying could be interpreted as this is all your fault. But that's black and white thinking. That's the cognitive bias. I'm not saying it's all your fault. I have no idea whose fault it is. I have no idea how old you are. I have no idea how many relationships you've had. I have no idea if you're in the right or you're in the wrong. I don't know. And at the same time, what I've seen as a psychiatrist time and time and time again is that some of this is your fault and some of it is their fault. That is the most correct answer. So what do you do about it?

You do what you can do. See, when we're hurt, when we have an anxious attachment style, this is true of limerence, okay? So this is really interesting. So limerence...

is when we have this unexplained, intense, powerful attraction to someone like someone else. It's a really interesting thing is that people get limerence not just because they have an anxious attachment style. There's one really specific difference. So people, and this isn't always true because there's not great data on limerence, but this is a really fascinating thing that I found on a paper in limerence once. People who grow up with limerence...

have withholding parents. Their parents don't meet all their emotional needs. So they develop this anxious attachment style where I don't develop confidence and I have to engage in a lot of distress behaviors to get people to be able to like take care of me. So if you leave the room, I'm going to start crying because if I don't cry, then you'll abandon me. So they get this fear of abandonment and they're very scared that people will always abandon them.

Now that's just an anxious attachment style. When does it become limerence?

It becomes limerence when there is a child with anxious attachment once in a while has a third caregiver. So your parents, maybe one or two parents, but there's a third object. There's me. There's the parental caregiver who's not giving me what I need. And once in a while, there is a person out there who gives me exactly what I need. But the interaction with them is short.

So my parents don't encourage me, but for three months before I moved, I had this coach who was everything that I always wanted, and they were so kind to me. And then the brain creates a structure where it is possible for a third thing out there that is distant—

to give me everything that I want. And this is what's so frustrating about limerence is in limerence, we see something very similar to this, where I'm attracted to this perfect person, but the closer I get to them, the worse things get. So limerence lasts for on average one to seven years.

Crazy. And after one to seven years, they transfer to a new limerent object. You may get too close to this person and then the reality doesn't match up to your fantasy and then the limerence moves to someone else. And why do people do this? It's because when they were growing up,

There was a fantastical figure who did everything for you, but it was just a slice. It was just a moment in time, maybe even one interaction when no one else, when your parents were not taking care of you, one teacher noticed or one parent of a friend noticed or one friend noticed. And for that one moment, everything that you wanted was satisfied. And that was true for you.

And then, of course, you as a human being, what do you do? You go looking for it again because you know it's out there. And of course you would. I would not blame you for that for a moment. You're looking for true love because you felt it once in your life. But woe is the person who's on the receiving end of all of your hopes and dreams. Where are all of the good men? Us average men can't compete with that.

Us normal men, us ordinary men, us flawed men, us men who are struggling, there's no way we can live up to your expectations. And the real tragedy of the matter is that we are the good men. Because most men, I think, are pretty good. Most women, I think, are pretty good. I know I'm going to alienate lots of camps when I say that. Most human beings, I think, are pretty good. So if you want to find love, I mean, I think, go for it.

Be a little bit careful about what you consume, because what you consume is what you will think. What you consume is what you will want. Advertisers understand that. That's why they advertise. It's literally mind control. So if you want your mind to function in a different way, change the diet of the mind. Look at what expectations you have. Look at what standards you're setting for other people. And usually when I work with anxious attachment people,

It's really common for one thing to really rise up, which is that the other person is trying to give you what you've always wanted. There's just a communication gap where you're not able to receive it, even though they're trying to give it. Because the way they were taught to give it, the way they were taught to express love,

is different from the way that you expect to receive love. So I have love, but that has to be translated. I cannot send you love. I have to convey love in a package. Is it a gift? Is it an expensive gift? Is it a kiss? Is it a communication? Is it dropping everything that I'm doing and rushing over to you? Is it a meal? And when I do each of those things, how do you interpret it? This is why finding your soulmate is just the first step.

The work of a relationship comes in that translation. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.