Your twin flame, your kindred spirit, your one and only. No matter what you call them, many people believe that somewhere out there exists another person that they’re destined to end up with.
And whether a student is looking for someone to spend the rest of their lives with or just wants to see who’s around for a 2 a.m. tryst, college is a significant time in many people’s lives when it comes to dating and relationship building in general.
But where do college students stand on the existence of perfectly-paired partners? To find out, we took a look at the average answers to the question do you believe in soulmates at a few schools across the nation.
Responses to this question lie on a scale of one to seven, with one representing “there’s no such thing” and seven being “they’re 100% out there.” The four schools we looked at, Clemson, Cornell, UMass Amherst, and Tufts, all found their average answers falling somewhere in the middle.
At each school, STEM majors were less likely on average to believe in soulmates than their non-STEM major peers, with education and language majors consistently answering among the highest. Women were more likely to answer higher than students of other genders across all four schools as well.
Whether or not you believe in soulmates has as much to do with your spirituality and belief in the predestined as it does with your tendency for romanticism, which is why it tracks that Catholics consistently answered the highest across all four schools and atheists and agnostics answered the lowest.
*We omitted religious identities with smaller populations in order to preserve the anonymity of those students.
UMass, Tufts, and Cornell all saw republicans answering the highest and socialists answering the lowest, whereas at Clemson, communists took the top spot.
At Clemson and UMass Amherst, the biggest believers in soulmates are only children, with oldest children believing the least. This trend wasn’t shared at Cornell and Tufts, where middle children answered the highest and only and oldest children answered the lowest respectively.
At Clemson and Cornell, seniors were the least likely to believe in soulmates, but at UMass Amherst and Tufts, they were the most likely, with juniors taking the lowest average answer.
The connection between sexual orientation and belief in soulmates was similarly split across schools, with either bisexual or pansexual students providing the highest average answer among their peers.
Demographic trends aside, one’s belief in soulmates is a product of their values, which are similarly reflected across their other romantic tendencies. For example, students who believe in soulmates are more likely to believe that a long-term relationship should be founded in passion and that sex should be romantic. They also are more likely to answer that they fall in love quickly and that they’d be disappointed if they didn’t meet their Marriage Pact match.
Conversely, the less a student believes in soulmates, the less they tend to think that their partner can be friends with an ex.
In the grand scheme of things, college is a frighteningly short part of our lived experience, and the odds of finding the love of your life on your college campus, if you even believe in them, are against you.
But hey, we’re always here to help.