HealthyGamerGG - Your Soulmate Isn’t On Hinge

Episode Date: February 21, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K explains why finding a "spark" feels harder than ever in a world dominated by dating apps. He explores the biological difference between logical compatibility and true romantic passion, showing how our modern approach to dating might actually be short-circuiting our ability to fall in love. What to expect in this episode: • Compatibility vs. Passion: Why treating dating like a job interview uses the wrong part of your brain and prevents you from feeling chemistry. • The "Spark" Calculus: A look at the Rate of Intimacy Model, which explains why passion comes from how fast you learn about someone, not just what you know. • The Dating App Trap: How having too much information upfront prevents the dopamine hit required to feel a deep romantic connection. • Dopamine Burnout: How modern habits like social media and video games can physically exhaust your brain's ability to fall in love. • Leveling Up Together: An introduction to the Self-Expansion Model, where two individuals transition from a "spark" into building a shared life as a single unit.HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Learn more at firstcitizens.com slash ambition. Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanoja, 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. Do you want to find your soulmate, or soulmate's even real?

And if they're real, how do you find them? The more messed up your dopamine circuitry is, the harder it is to fall in love. Dating apps actually shoot us in the first. foot because they're selecting for friendship. They're selecting for compatibility. But compatibility is not love. Today, we're going to talk about soulmates. So if you look at the world today, everyone wants to find, well, I don't know if everyone wants to find. A lot of people want to find their soulmate. But if we look at sort of outcomes, data and things like that, it's really, really, really hard to find a soulmate in today's world. Dating is an absolute mess. The number of

Dick's exchanged is at an all-time historic high. We see, you know, the lowest fertility rates that we've seen in many, many, many decades or centuries. In East Asia, in the United States, and in the Western world, people are getting married later. Fewer people are getting married. A number of kids that we're having is going down. People are struggling. There's a loneliness epidemic across the globe that is probably the worst loneliness epidemic that we've ever faced as the human race. So despite the fact that we have so many opportunities for connection,

we are the loneliest that we've ever been. And there are all these things called dating apps, right? And these dating apps promise that, hey, if you use this app, you will be able to find love, find your soulmate. I don't know if they promise that. I don't know what they actually promise. But something weird is going on because as our access to potential partners has actually increased theoretically, right?

The cool thing about dating apps is I can run into and interact with people that I would not normally run into. People are like struggling even more than ever. And so then this question becomes, okay, do you want to find your soulmate? or soulmates even real? And if they're real, how do you find them? So this is such a challenging question to answer

because there aren't studies on soulmates, right? No one's doing randomized control trials or prospective cohort studies on soulmates. How do you define it from a scientific term? So the first thing that we're going to talk about is when we talk about love, what does this mean? So the thing about soulmates is that we fall in love. So this is a paper called Critical Review of the Meaning of the Concept of Love.

Great paper. You know, there was a researcher in 1977 who conducted an in-depth research into the phenomenon of love and found that the concept of love can actually be decided into several different types or sub-aspects. Okay. So this is something that was actually defined in, I think, ancient Greece. So Eros, this type of love is characterized by strong and passionate passion. People feel fascinated and crazy about their partner, classic form of romantic love. Okay. So when you find your soulmate, do you feel passion?

do you feel fascinated and crazy. Lutus. This type of love reflects a more competitive or playful approach to relationships. People who adhere to this type of love tend to see relationships as a gain to be won or as a challenge to be completed. Right. So this is kind of a more playful love. It's kind of like, you know, who wins in the end. So Storge, the type of love that grows from friendships and relationships that build on similar interests.

So this is a love that slowly grows and develop, develop. from the intimacy and mutual understanding that has existed over a long time. So when people say, like, how do I get out of the friend zone? Right? This is a big debate. Can someone who, if you fall in love with your best friend, can something happen? Yes, I think the answer is yes. Pragma, love that is seen practically or pragmatically, people who adhere to this type of love

tend to choose partners based on practical criteria such as suitability of value, social status, and financial stability. Power couples. Relationships is a means to achieve. goals or fulfill certain needs. Mania is a type of love that tends to be obsessive, may feel anxious or insecure in their relationships, tend to pursue their partners with a need for constant attention and validation, characterized by strong and unstable emotions. A gape love, a love, a form of love based on commitment, sacrifice, and selfless care for one's partner, altruistic and ennobling love,

prepared to make sacrifices for the happiness and well-being of their partner. So the first thing that I want to point out. See, when we talk about finding your soulmate, what does that mean? Does that mean that you fall in love with someone? But if we look at the concept of love, it actually encompasses a lot of different things. And I think the first mistake that we make when we try to find our soulmate is that we mix all of these things together. So I think this is where we see the first problem with dating apps, which is that if you look at it, right, so there's a practical kind of love. Right. So we have pragma love. So this is a love where it's like you're looking at this other person and you're saying, I have, I'm this religion, I want kids, this is what I want my financial, I want to be a stay at home dad, I want to be a stay at home mom.

I want my, and my partner wants to be married to a stay at home mom, a stay at home dad, right? They want to work. They want someone to be at home with the kids. They want to have kids. We have a similar religion. This is qualitatively different from passion for Eros, from mania. So that's a second dimension. Now, I think the biggest problem, and this is why it's important, understand, these two things are different,

because the majority of using dating apps, we're selecting for pragma, not passion. We're not falling in love. We're gauging people like job interviews. So this is actually closer to matchmaking. Relationships have never been easy. Anytime you interact with someone, you're dealing with their unique soup of emotions, expectations, and even traumatic baggage. And the fact that we're all texting now and dating apps or a thing is not making things easier. That's why we developed a coaching program to help our community with modern relationship problems.

So if y'all are struggling with your relationships, check out the link in the description below. So in India, even to this day, we have arranged marriages. So arranged marriages are when, like, your parents and somebody else's parents get together. They look at your religious, like, do you eat meat? Do you drink alcohol? are you like financially stable? Do you all want to have kids? Like they look at all of these factors and they try to match them up. It is a pragmatic approach to love. And love is not even a part of that, right? So it's like even in arranged marriages, what what tends to happen. So this is like how it's been

described to me is that you match initially. And so I was talking to, you know, one of my close family friends. And I was asking him like, you know, what was it like when you met your wife? And he was like, we met the day before we got married. And it was decided to be a good match. And then over time, so they've been married for like 40 years and happily so. They've raised a couple of kids. Their kids are doing great. Their grandkids are doing great.

They're like living their best life. And so then they also develop this other kind of storage love, right? So this is a love that is based on friendships and relationships. So this is like we've been together for a long time. We've grown together for a long time. It's not this passionate eros kind of. of love. So the first thing that we have to be careful about, and we'll understand why this is in a minute, is that if we're selecting for one type of love, it may actually come at the cost of another

kind of love. So over time, I think you can develop them all in all of the aspects. But at the beginning, as we'll see, there are a couple of really interesting models of love and passion and intimacy that make it hard to fall in love and feel that spark in that chemistry if you are mentally approaching it like a job interview. If you're trying to find your best partner, the partner that fits with your life, this is utilizing a different part of your brain than the part of your brain that falls in love. So I think what's actually going on is that what we're seeing, the reason it's so hard to find chemistry with people is because we are actually selecting for one part of our brain instead of the other. So let's talk about that for a second.

If we look at studies on falling in love, what fuels passion and integrative review of competing theories of romantic passion? So we're going to talk about two theories. So there's something called the rate of change in intimacy model. And there is something called the self-expansion model. So let's explain what these are. So if you look at like studies on how human beings fall in love. There are a couple of different models that describe the romantic love, the eros love. Okay. So here's how we're approaching this lecture. So soulmates. Question number one, are they real? If yes, is there a biology to soulmates? And is there a, let's call it spirituality to soulmates? So are we talking about a soul as like a transcendental concept? Or is the experience of soulmates just, you know,

in their brains. So next thing that we have to do is that there are different types of love. Eros, pragma, storage. Okay? And then a gape. This is the sacrificial. So now the question becomes, are there biological mechanisms towards these different things? And the answer is yes. So pragma love is going to be from your frontal lobes, right? This is, we're making calculations, analyses. storage love is going to be friendship, allies, partners. I'm not sure exactly where that comes from. Maybe this is something related to oxytocin, but maybe not. And then there's a gape love, which is sacrifice.

So you put this person ahead of yourselves. So this comes from the parts of our brain that give us compassion, right? So this is a different kind of love. And then we have eros. So now we're going to look at a couple of different models. So this is falling in love, this feeling of a soul. Like, what does it feel like to meet your soulmate? You feel so connected.

You love them. You just met them and you feel a spark. That's why we're going to talk about the rate of intimacy model. Okay? So let's understand this. Here's time. Here is how well you know someone. So when I meet a soulmate, I don't know them very well.

I just met them for the first time. And I learn a little bit about them. And I learn a little bit more. Then we start hanging out. Then we start hanging out more. And I'm learning more. oh my God, now we're trauma bonding. Now we're connected. Now I'm discovering this. And now, oh my God, we like all the same bands. And then eventually, actually, this is maybe a better

indication of it. So now I'm falling in love, but then something starts to happen. Now I know a lot about them. Now I'm starting to, hey, you know, we're kind of getting into a relationship. I'm still learning things about them. These things are not as fun as before. And then eventually I know them. So what this model posits, and I think there's neuroscientific evidence of this, is at the rate at which you are getting to know someone. So how much more, how much is intimacy increased here? Right? Let's say it's increased zero. How much is it intimacy increased here? It's increased three. How much is it increased here? It's increased five. How much is it increased here? Now it's increased 10. So this is like, if we're looking at calculus, it's the rate of change.

The level of intimacy is accelerating. So I knew one fact about them today. Then I knew three things about them, then I knew five things about them, then I knew 10 things. So this is plus two, plus one, plus, oh, this is plus two, so that doesn't really make sense. And here's plus five, right? Does that make sense? So this number has to be going up. When this number is going up, we are falling in love. And then what the rate of intimacy model even shows us is that thus, this model suggests that when intimacy is rising quickly, it's not whether intimacy is high or low. It's the rate at which it accelerates. Passion will be high.

In contrast, when intimacy is stable and no longer increasing, few new details and experiences are being shared, passion will be low. Given that there is only so much information to be learned about a partner, intimacy often plateaus and relationships, at which point passion starts to decline. So this is what the intimacy model sort of shows us. So when we meet our soulmate, we fall in love with them. We are already in love with them. And then we learn more and we learn more and we learn more and we fall further and further and

further in love. And then what oftentimes happens when we meet our soulmates? Things kind of get stable. They kind of like fall out of whack, things like that, right? It's not so much anymore falling out of love. So if we want to have a healthy relationship that starts with an eros love, once we get to this phase, we have to replace it with something else. And this is where you can start out with eros, but then do you?

you add pragma? Do you add storage? Do you add a gape? Right? This is what allows people to fall in love for like three months and then be happily married for 40 years. The quality of love is different. The neuroscience of the love is different. So let's talk about neuroscience a little bit. So this kind of love is governed by the nucleus accumbens and dopamine. So if we remember, dopamine gives us a sense of pleasure, gives us a sense of craving, and gives us a sense of behavioral reinforcement, right? So if I smoke a cigarette, I get some pleasure from it, and then I want another one, and then I smoke another one. So what we know from studies on love is that when you are with someone that you love, we're talking about this phase, okay, the rate of intimacy. We're talking about eros. So their presence secretees

dopamine in your brain. That's it. Just their presence. They don't even have to be doing any And then like if you've been in love, like you kind of know what I'm talking about, right? Like you're just with them and you can't wait to be with them. I crave you. What part of you, any part of you? You're holding hands. You're hanging out. You're walking around.

You're eating meals. You're just with the other person. You don't need any kind of activity. And that's just simply because their presence secretes dopamine. Gives you pleasure, causes you to crave them, right? And causes you to seek them out again. Another key thing about this is that this also suppresses. your risk assessment circuits, and suppresses your analytical circuits.

This is why, when you fall in love, you do stupid things. This is a feature, not a bug. Now, if we sort of look at this, what that means is that eros is going to inhibit pragma. Now, the question becomes, does pragma also inhibit eros? So now let's look at a different model. So this is time. Here is intimacy. So now let's look at the dating app model.

So if we look at dating apps, what we see is that the level that you get to know someone over time is actually way higher. Right. So you start out learning a lot of stuff about them before you even talk to them. You learn what they do, what their prior relationships are. Do they have kids? What do they like? Do they share interests? And then we select people based on this.

So there are a couple of big problems with this. The first is that shared interests develop into friendships, right? So storage love or the love of friendships and relationships built on similar interests is not actually like that's not what leads to falling in love. And we also see this from a rate of intimacy change model. So if I already know people and then I start talking to them, I get to know them a little bit, I get to know them a little bit. Maybe we hang out, maybe we talk a little bit.

I really felt some connection, but then there goes. me the next day. So this is plus one, or this is plus zero, plus one. Sorry, that's a four. Plus one, plus one, plus one. So the rate of change is constant, right? This is just, it's moving by a factor of plus one. Whereas if we look at the Eros model, it's moving like this. So I think this is why it's so hard to fall in love on dating apps, because the requisite circuitry to release the chemicals in our nucleus accumbens that causes us to find pleasure and craving and behavioral reinforcement, dating apps actually shoot us in the foot because they're selecting for friendship. They're selecting for compatibility.

But compatibility is not love, y'all. In fact, compatibility, I think, is sometimes the opposite of love. And now we get to something that's also kind of interesting from like a neuroscience perspective. See, at a given time, your right hemisphere or your left. hemispheres is dominantly active. A great example of this is if we look at the way that art is made. So if I'm like writing something, a creative pursuit, within me, there is an author and there's an editor. There's a person who feels inspired to create, and then there's another person who judges the creation and says that it is not good enough and needs to be improved in certain ways.

Oftentimes when we engage in creative pursuits, until we resolve this conflict, it becomes impossible to write. Right? You can't, when you're painting a painting, you can't judge your painting while you're painting it, otherwise you won't be able to paint. There is a balance for sure. So I think what's going on in, especially in dating apps, and the way that we are meeting, it's not just apps. It's the way that we're meeting people is we don't open ourselves up to soulmates. We're judging people before we even meet them. We're learning a lot before we even meet them. And the more that we learn, the more we short circuit our brain's ability to fall for someone. Second thing here is that eros love comes from the right hemisphere.

Pragma love comes from the left hemisphere. Storage love, not quite sure, but probably more left than right. And so when we're approaching these dating situations, it feels like a job interview. We're trying to find the right partner, but the right partner on paper. No one ever said that a soulmate is perfect for you on paper. Or maybe they did. I don't know. They tend to be perfect for you as a person. So I think this is one of the biggest problems with finding soulmates is we're not in a neuroscience situation that is conducive to creating the chemical soup that makes us feel like we found our soulmate. Okay? That's number one. A couple of other things to keep in mind. Since this is governed by our dopamine circuitry, the more messed up your dopamine circuitry is, the harder it is to fall in love.

So as we use video games, pornography, social media, substances, it becomes harder to fall in love from this Eros perspective, right? So if we have like our dopamine stores are exhausted, our dopamine system is all messed up. You just can't feel it in the same way. Now, people may say, but like, you know, drugs and love go so well together, Dr. Kay. Agreed. But this is where I think it's useful to talk about manic love. So manic love is an insecure love and a very emotional love, an emotionally love. an emotionally unstable love.

So oftentimes, I think the other thing that happens is that we mistake people for our soulmates. And the reason we mistake them for our soulmates is because we have an emotional deficit that this person is filling. And that feels so good, we think they are our soulmate. So if I have insecure attachment and someone treats me well, I may think that this person is my soulmate. You know, when I'm using substances, my emotions are all over the place. They're more activated. They're more deactivated. Maybe I'm hung over.

And so I think that like the chemistry is altered. And when the chemistry is altered, a feeling of something like love can arise from it. But then the problem is that this relationship, if the feeling of eros arises because both of y'all are high, what happens to the feeling of eros when both of y'all are sober? So I think that there's a lot of needs being met that can be mistaken for someone being my soulmate.

Now, over time, let's say that you guys both get sober together or you figure out some system, you all become really good friends, you actually do start dating. Like, good things can come out of that. Maybe the person is your soulmate. My point is that, you know, you have to be careful about is this person meeting my needs for the first time? So I also recently saw a study that showed that men are more devastated by breakups than women are, psychologically, objectively. And the reason for that is because for a man, they are not just losing. a lover, they are losing for most men, their primary, they're also losing their best friend. So the likelihood that you're in a heteronormative relationship, the likelihood that your

female partner is the primary source of emotional support in your life is very high, whereas women tend to have other sources of emotional support on average. So it's kind of like you're losing everything at once. So when you're hungry for something, it can appear like something is your soulmate. But I would say this is the more manic love. Okay, so this is a quick neuroscience jaunt into soulmate. So I think that if we take a biological approach in summary, there is a set of things that create these subjective experience of meeting your soulmate.

And if we look at the stories of meeting your soulmate, I think these are consistent. So a key thing about meeting your soulmate is that you don't know a whole lot about them first, usually. You run into them somewhere. You don't know much about them. and then you get to know them and you feel this powerful connection. And the connection is not because they have a certain profession or they have a certain, you know, their genitals are configured a particular way.

There's something about them that you feel connected to and the more you learn about them, the more the connection intensifies. Oftentimes soulmates don't share interests with you. Like this is also something that I consistently see in my practice. Definitely true of my wife and I were talking the other day. Our marriage would be so much easier if, We liked one thing that was the same. We don't share a single interest generally.

It's like, I'm into these three things. She's into these three things. They don't overlap, like, at all. So dating apps are really leaning into this, like, pragmatic accountability. And when I talk to people about, you know, meeting their soulmate, like this is usually, I'll share with y'all like a story from a patient to mine. So patient of mine went to a conference. And as part of their networking job, they met someone.

And there was something of a spark. And so my patient was manning a booth. And so they met this person at like some mixer. Next day the person stopped by, said hello. They chatted for a little bit. Like, you know, oh, I'm wrapping up for the day. You want to grab a drink? Sure.

Is this networking? Is it a business? Is it a date? That's what's fun about conferences. So then they exchanged contact info. You know, oh, my company will be in touch with your company. Maybe we can do a deal together. Fantastic.

Then the fun started. Hey, it was great meeting you. last month at this conference. There's, are you going to the expo in Vegas next month? Cool. I'll see you there. And so for one year, two different people, completely different set of interests, they would meet, just like neither of them like visits each other,

because it's not clear that they're dating even, but they're like chasing each other around the country at conferences. And then I'm sure they started having sex at some point. I'm not exactly sure. But I'm, you know, I think that's what happened. But they like basically had this relationship that was like, you know, I'm going to see you for four days once every other month. And if you're going to that, because it's crazy. It's like we're not dating, right?

Like it's stupid to be dating now. But I can't stay away from you. And both of them are like, and this is what happens with soulmate connections. And they don't know each other well. It's not even clear that they're a good match for each other or anything like that. They're just so there's a connection. And the cool thing is if we look at the neuroscience, like we can talk about this connection. And the second thing that we're going to talk about.

So what do you replace it with? So you start with eros love, and then maybe some pragma comes in, maybe some storage comes in, maybe some agape comes in. I'm sorry if I'm butchering those pronunciations. And as those three things start to come in, we move to another model of passion, the self-expansion model. So this is another thing about soulmates. Describe passion as arising from individuals expanding their sense of self through their romantic partner or self-expansion. So what does this mean? So human beings like to level up.

So I grow in this way. I'm a medical student. I'm a college student. Then I'm a medical student. Now I'm a doctor. Now I'm a psychiatrist. Right. So we like to level up.

And at some point, what some human beings start to do is they start leveling up through someone else. I am leveling up. Now we are a we. Now my partner's accomplishments become my sources of pride. Now we're celebrating. Right. So when I graduated from medical school, I was broke. And my wife was not.

And then she took us on a trip to celebrate. And then so that was like her accomplishment too. You know, so like we start to grow. Like we become a we. Now it's our life together. Now like so the way that I was leveling up, now I have kids. Now we want our kids to do well. Now we have a house.

Now we're going on vacation. You know, now she gets to trot me around when she wants to. So like this is this self-expansion model. So this is where like when you meet your soulmate, It's, so I'm leveling up over here. My soulmate is leveling up over here. And at some point, we, we join, and then we start leveling up together. Now it is our life.

Now this person becomes a part of me. They've always felt like they're a part of me, but we're starting to build a life together. Does that make sense? So soulmates will, they were meant to be together. And then now, like, the meantness of being together also, like, ripples out into your life. Now you all build a life together. And that's what we, it was not, it was not just that initial spark. we really were meant to be.

So I think we transition from this rate of intimacy model to a self-expansion model. So this could explain how we find our soulmates in the real world. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.

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