The world where everyone has a soul mate who they occasionally swap bodies with is better than our world

 

Essentially, this is like an arranged relationship where the universe itself is telling you that any other relationship you choose to form is wrong. That’s going to affect any other potentially loving relationships you try to form. Any relationship established before the age of 16 is basically doomed. The moment you wake up in someone else’s body and its not the body of your high school sweetheart, you know destiny is working against you. Perhaps even worse, you know that every relationship going forward that you have with someone else is doomed to fail. Every relationship you build with someone else can only ever be compared with the perceived perfection of the soul mate. For those that can meet their soul mate, that might not be terrible, but for those without the means to travel to another continent where their soul mate lives, they and their soul mate may be forced to live in what I will call “relationship purgatory”: regularly experiencing the life of someone perfect for them while trying to make another objectively worse relationship work. And if you aren’t swapping bodies, then you know that no soul mate exists for you, dooming them to an existence with no possibility of finding a soul mate and leaving them to always feel as though they are settling for second best.

 

However, this doesn’t just sabotage other relationships; it disrupts the entire process of building a relationship, which is integral for forming the bonds that make a relationship strong. Pro appears to view this as a positive, arguing that “Many days and months pass by within dates before you are able to” say the dreaded words “I love you”. Pro never attributes a harm to this length of time, but the benefits are striking: longer periods of time spent dating lead to longer, stronger marriages.[https://www.businessinsider.com/how-long-you-should-date-before-you-get-married-2017-10] Essentially, you lose the strength that comes with building a relationship by not dating ahead of time. Your personal attraction to one another and the strength of your bond aren’t and cannot be decided by the universe. They are baked into the process of building a relationship.

 

So, what does Pro’s world lose? It’s not just dating, but also the slow process of understanding and opening up to one another. Intimacy isn’t a one-step process for any relationship in our world, but Pro compacts intimate understanding of your partner into 24-hour chunks. If you’ve been in a relationship, you know how awful this sounds. Intimate interactions build at different rates with different couples, but usually, you wait a while before you leave the door open to the bathroom while you’re on the toilet. That admittedly gross experience comes after years of building a life together, but Pro’s world places us directly in the body of our soul mate for 24 hours, meaning we will be performing all the intimate acts that we would normally be exposed to more slowly and from a distance. You can read every private message, know every intimate detail of their bodies, and do it all with someone who is a complete stranger.

 

 

Pro’s argument for why this would reduce crime comes with absolutely no warrants beyond, essentially, “love conquers all”, linking having a soul mate to reduced loneliness or depression.

 

There are so many problems with this. First, Pro presents no correlation between this or any other feels of connection and a reduced propensity to commit crimes. Crimes are committed for a wide variety of reasons, including a wide variety of biological, psychological and sociological causes that do not include knowledge of a soul mate.[https://online.maryville.edu/online-bachelors-degrees/forensic-psychology/why-people-commit-crimes/] The notion that it generates a form of sympathy or understanding is entirely theoretical, and it is impossible to determine the psychological impact of this interaction, much less how that will affect interactions with others. Second, a soul mate relationship is not necessarily one without troubles, and “people in troubled relationships are three times as likely to experience depression as those who aren’t.”[https://www.relate.org.uk/relationship-help/help-relationships/mental-health/relationships-and-depression] If relationships like this are troubled – and the experience of having oneself laid bare is bound during one of the foundational moments in our growth is bound to create some problems – then depression could become more common, not less. Third, this assumes that everyone is more likely to build a relationship. If anything, knowledge of a soul mate who may live very far away from you, not speak your language, come from a family that is outright hostile towards you, etc. can lead to strong feelings of isolation. People may feel that all other relationships pale in comparison, functionally increasing their loneliness by isolating them from those around them in search of “the one.”

 

But Pro ignores the biggest problem with criminal activity in his world: how is criminal activity done in someone else’s body prosecuted? Chiefly, this regards what someone might do with someone else’s body, whether based in perversion, greed, masochism or sheer morbid curiosity. And it’s not just a question of whether we call death murder or suicide. Who dies if the body dies with someone else in control? Is the other person now stuck in a body that isn’t their own? Similarly, if someone goes into a coma, then who has the coma when they return to their original bodies? It’s also possible that they locked themselves in their room or even bound themselves before this occurs. Are they not responsible for keeping someone bound and gagged without food or water if that person is still wearing their skin?

 

These questions are fundamental to how crimes would be perceived by the justice system, and each could dramatically affect an individual’s willingness to commit those crimes. As Pro has left them unclear, we should assume that the legal system is utterly incapable of addressing this dimension of crime in Pro’s world. There is no precedent for this, and Pro provides no means to know whether someone actually did change bodies, so someone could commit crimes and play it off as though another person was in control at the time. Pro is creating a Purge-like situation where people can claim insanity every month to justify the worst crimes imaginable, and you’d never know if they were telling the truth.