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What's up y'all? Welcome to Milded Heart, our series on love, sex, and masculinity after

Peer to Culture here at Straight White JC. My name is Brad O'Nishi. Today I want to shift

to talking about love. We've discussed masculinity, we've discussed sex, and I want to just

bring in the theme of love and talk about how Peer to Culture does a good job of ruining

it and how it also plays into notions of masculinity and relates to men. Peer to Culture

treads in a pretty familiar terrain when it comes to the idea of love in American society,

in European societies, and so on, and that is the myth of the soulmate, right? And so

many of you out there, I mean, I would gander all of you, have heard some version of the

soulmate recently, right? Hearing anybody asks, ask, is he or she, is they? Are they?

The one is an iteration of the soulmate myth. A soulmate myth is the idea that we all have

one person for whom we are destined when it comes to love, and that person is our other

half, our supposed life partner, the person for whom we are destined, all of that stuff.

Now the first mention of the word soulmate was actually from the poet Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, and Coleridge used it in his writing, going back to 1822, it was in a letter

where he says to be happy to marry life, you must have a soulmate. Now this was a departure

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