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Tony Milligan, Senior Researcher in the Philosophy of Ethics, Cosmological Visionaries Project, King's College London

Valentine's Day: a brief history of the soulmate – and why it's a limited concept

Francesca da Rimini by William Dyce (1837), depicting Dante's Francesca and Paolo. National Gallery of Scotland, CC BY-SA

One of the difficult things about working on the philosophy of love is that human relationships change, but our dominant images of love tend to remain the same.

The stability of these images reassures us that love is something deep, but we can also be trapped by them. The image of the soulmate has been around for a long time, yet our world has changed a great deal and so have our expectations of one another.

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