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Romantic comedies, love stories, dating websites and the wedding industry would have you believe that somewhere in the world there is a person for you, and not just any person but your “soul mate”. One day you will find the only person who really knows you, who understands you and, most importantly, will love you for the rest of your life, or even for eternity. So if there really is just one person in the world for you, how likely is it that you will find them?

If there really is just one person for you in the world, that’s bad news. Randall Munroe, author of a book dealing with absurd hypothetical questions called What If?, calculated the likelihood of finding your one true soul mate. Assuming your soul mate is alive at the same time as you, and that you would like to meet someone within your age group, Munroe estimates the number of times people make eye contact with strangers every day and calculates the likelihood of you finding your special someone to be 1 in 10,000. This is assuming you will recognise each other and fall in love the instant your eyes meet.

Munroe puts the average number of living candidates for your soul mate at half a billion, but if there is only one person in the world for you at any point in history, that number climbs to one hundred billion. With only seven billion people alive now, 90 per cent of our soul mates are dead.

But it gets worse. Your soul mate may not be born yet! Putting aside the inevitable destruction of the Earth, and most probable extinction of humans long before that, we need to include an unknowable number of possible soul mates in the future. The likelihood of you being born in the same century, yet alone meeting them, becomes practically zilch.

So if you haven’t found “The One” yet, feel comfort in the fact that probably nobody in history ever has either. Maybe we should replace the expression “soul mate” with “person whose company I enjoy and who can tolerate me for a few decades until we both die”. Be happy that there isn’t just one person in the world that you are compatible with. Even if your true love is one in a million, there are still 4.5 of them in New Zealand.