happily ever after

When you’re growing up, the meaning of ‘happily ever after’ seems so unambiguous. You find your person, you get together with that person, and then you spend the rest of your lives in a state of unified bliss. No need to see what happens after the wedding. That’s boring. Forget for a moment the myriad broken relationships littering our parents’ generation: love was love, and when you had it you could overcome anything. Nothing could be more natural.

So, we’ve spent our lives looking for a soulmate—that one mythical person who supplies all our affection, intimacy, emotional support and understanding. A perfect, unbreakable pair. Yet a rising tide of psychologists and evolutionary biologists are discovering that co-dependence is a far-from-natural state of being for humans to be in and that by dedicating ourselves so wholly to one person we may be diminishing not only each other, but also the community