Found Your Other Half Yet? A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Explains Plato’s Famous Myth of Soulmates
Love is the desire and pursuit of the whole. — Plato, Symposium
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Plato’s Symposium is one of the greatest works ever written about love. In it, a group of distinguished Athenians take turns praising Eros, the god of love. The comic playwright Aristophanes chooses not to argue philosophically, but to tell a myth. His tale of divided human beings searching for their lost halves has become one of the most influential stories about romantic love ever told.
The myth probably draws on the cosmology of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. More importantly, it helped shape the modern idea that love is the search for one’s ‘other half’.
The Myth
In the beginning, there were three kinds of people: male, descended from the sun; female, descended from the earth; and hermaphrodite, with both male and female parts, descended from the moon.
These early people were completely round, each with four arms and four legs, two identical faces on opposite sides of a head with four ears, and all else to match. They walked both forward and backward and ran by turning cartwheels on their eight limbs, moving in circles like their parents the planets.
Because they were wild and unruly and threatening to scale the heavens, Zeus, the father of the gods, cut each one down the middle ‘like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling’—and even threatened to do the same again so that they might hop on one leg.
Apollo, the god of light and enlightenment, then turned their heads to make them face towards their wound, pulled their skin around to cover up the wound, and tied it together at the navel like a purse. He made sure to leave a few wrinkles on what became known as the abdomen so that they might be reminded of their punishment.
After that, people searched all over for their other half. When they finally found it, they wrapped themselves around it so tightly and unremittingly that they began to die from hunger and neglect. Taking pity on them, Zeus moved their genitals to the front so that those who were previously androgynous could procreate, and those who were previously male could obtain satisfaction and move on to higher things.
Aristophanes explains that this is the origin of erotic desire: those of us who desire members of the opposite sex used to be hermaphrodites, whereas men who desire men used to be male, and women who desire women used to be female.
When we find our other half, we are ‘lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy’ that cannot be accounted for by mere lust, but by the need to be whole again, to be restored to our original nature. Our greatest wish, if we could only have it, would then be for Hephæstus, the god of fire, to melt us into one another so that our souls could be at one and share in a common fate.
Interpretation
The myth is often remembered as the origin of the idea that each of us has a soulmate. But this is only part of Aristophanes’ point.
Human beings long not merely for another person but for completeness. Love promises to heal the fundamental wound of separation that defines the human condition. Our desire is therefore not merely sexual, but metaphysical.
Yet Plato also points beyond Aristophanes. The Symposium culminates not in this myth but in Socrates’ account of love as a longing for beauty, wisdom, and ultimately the Form of Beauty itself. Romantic love may awaken the soul, but philosophy teaches it to seek something higher.
Seen in this light, Aristophanes’ myth is both profoundly true and profoundly incomplete. Human beings naturally seek wholeness in another person, yet no finite relationship can fully satisfy the longing for transcendence. The beloved points beyond itself towards truth, beauty, and the good.
That is why the myth still resonates. It expresses something universal about human loneliness while suggesting that our deepest longing may not ultimately be for another person, but for the lost wholeness that another person only seems to promise.
Plato’s ladder of love: from the beauty of the body to Beauty itself.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 19 August 2026.
The Man Who Coined ‘Platonic Love’
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the knowledge of Greek was lost in the West. In around 321 CE, the philosopher Calcidius had published a Latin translation of the first part of Plato’s Timaeus, which for almost 800 years remained the only substantial section of Plato available to the Latin West.
Fortunately, the study of Plato continued in the Byzantine Empire and Islamic world. At the 1438-39 Council of Florence, the Byzantine scholar George Gemistos Plethon reintroduced Plato to the West as part of a failed attempt to repair the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Church and present a united front to the Ottoman Empire (Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453).
While in Florence, Gemistos Plethon made an impression on the banker, politician, and patron of the arts Cosimo de’ Medici, who had, among others, commissioned the David of Donatello, the first freestanding male nude sculpture since antiquity. He persuaded Cosimo to establish an institute and informal discussion group, now known as the Platonic Academy of Florence, which, under Cosimo’s protégé Marsilio Ficino, went on to translate all of Plato’s extant works into Latin. This, in turn, ignited and inflamed the humanist Renaissance.
It is also Ficino who coined the term ‘Platonic love’ (amor platonicus), which first appears in a letter that he wrote to Alamanno Donati in 1476. In 1492, he published a series of Platonic love letters to Giovanni amico mio perfettissimo (‘Giovanni my most perfect friend’), the poet Giovanni Cavalcanti.
Today, ‘Platonic love’ means what Ficino, who lived in a much more closeted time, intended it to mean: a close relationship from which sex and sexual desire are absent, or not acted upon. Whatever it was, Ficino presented his love for Giovanni not as sexual but as elevating. But Plato’s vision of love is a lot more radical and ambitious than Ficino’s idea of it. We glimpse it in dialogues such as the Greater Alcibiades, in the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, and in the Phaedrus, in the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus. It also appears in other dialogues such as the Lysis, the Meno, and the Charmides, in which Socrates sees inside Charmides’ cloak and ‘catches fire’. Then, in the Symposium, Plato literally spells it out.
Socrates and Alcibiades
Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, ‘For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.’ By all accounts, his greatest love was with the famously handsome Alcibiades (450-404 BCE), who was by some twenty years his junior.
In 432, Socrates and Alcibiades fought in the Battle of Potidaea, where the middle-aged plebeian and the young aristocrat became unlikely tent mates. In his Life of Alcibiades, Plutarch relates that ‘all were amazed to see [Alcibiades] eating, exercising, and tenting with Socrates, while he was harsh and stubborn with the rest of his lovers’. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades reports that Socrates singlehandedly saved his life at Potidaea and, even after that, let him keep the prize for valour.
Plato’s Symposium is set in 416, some 16 years after the Battle of Potidaea, and just before the fateful Sicilian Expedition that led Alcibiades to defect to Sparta. The setting is a drinking party hosted by the playwright Agathon. After each of the guests, including Socrates, has made a speech in praise of love, a drunken Alcibiades stumbles in supported by a flute-girl. When Alcibiades entreats everyone to drink and match him in his drunkenness, the other guests object to ‘drinking as if we were thirsty’ and suggest that Alcibiades instead make a speech in praise of Socrates.
Alcibiades says that Socrates always makes him admit that he is wasting his time on his political career while neglecting his several shortcomings. So he tears himself away from him as from the song of a siren and once again lets his love of popularity get the better of him. Socrates may look like a satyr and pose as ignorant, but, like the busts of Silenus (the tutor of Dionysus), he hides bright and beautiful images of the gods within him. Attracted by his wisdom, he tried several times to seduce him, but each time without success. Eventually, he turned the tables round and began to chase the older man, inviting him to dinner and on one occasion persuading him to stay the night. He then lay beside him and put it to him that, of all his lovers, he was the only one worthy of him, and he would be a fool to refuse him any favours if only he could make him into a better man.
Socrates replied in his usual, ironical manner:
Alcibiades, my friend, you have indeed an elevated aim if what you say is true, and if there really is in me any power by which you may become better; truly you must see in me some rare beauty of a kind infinitely higher than any which I see in you. And therefore, if you mean to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearance—like Diomedes, gold in exchange for brass.
After this, Alcibiades crept under the older man’s threadbare cloak and held him all night in his arms—but in the morning arose ‘as from the couch of a father or an elder brother’.
All this, says Alcibiades, took place before Potidaea. But how much of his drunken account is true, and how much invented by Plato to rehabilitate the reputation of Socrates? Socrates—remember—was put to death, in part, for ‘corrupting the youth’.
In the little-known Alcibiades of Aeschines, Socrates relates a conversation that he once had with Alcibiades. Socrates tells his companion that, if he was at all able to improve Alcibiades, this was not through any knowledge or art that he possessed, but only by the force of the love (eros) that the enfant terrible had aroused in him.
The relationship turns the conventional hierarchy of beauty on its head. Alcibiades possesses youth and physical beauty, not to mention birth and position, but it is the old, ugly, and plebeian Socrates who possesses the inner beauty that Alcibiades, when he dares, most desires.
Socrates and Phaedrus
The ostensible theme of Plato’s Phaedrus is love and pederasty, and the dialogue is full of flirtatious banter and sexual innuendo. Socrates persuades the young Phaedrus to pull out the speech on love that he is hiding under his cloak… The grass on which they lie down to read the speech is ‘like a pillow gently sloping to the head’ … After Phaedrus has read the speech, Socrates says, ‘the effect on me was ravishing. And this I owe to you Phaedrus, for I observed you while reading to be in an ecstasy … and like you, my divine darling, I became inspired with a phrenzy.’
But although the Phaedrus appears, especially at first, to be about love, it is more properly about the education of the soul, which might be led to wisdom by the power of love or dialectic (reasoned discourse), although not, as Socrates argues, oratory (rhetoric) or the written word. Just as the Phaedo used to be called, On the Soul, so the Phaedrus might have been called, On the Education of the Soul.
Despite his emphasis on Apollonian reason, Plato recognises that the original impulse for philosophy arises out of something as irrational and Dionysian as love. However, this love, although most fertile, is not of the reproductive kind, and must be reined in if it is to serve its purpose. For Plato, the body with its needs and pleasures is a source of distraction and confusion that hold us back from wisdom. In particular, the needs and desires of the body are why we waste our substance going to work and to war, focussing always on particulars rather than the universals that are the objects of wisdom.
Although Socrates and Phaedrus openly flirt with each other, Plato has them sit beneath a chaste tree. According to Pliny the Elder, the matrons of Athens, at the time of the Thesmophoria (the festival of Demeter and Persephone), used to place the stems and leaves of the chaste in their bedding to temper their lust.
When, at the end of the dialogue, Socrates prays to the gods of the place, he calls himself ‘a temperate man’; and when he asks Phaedrus to complete the prayer, Phaedrus responds, ‘Ask the same for me, for friends have all things in common.’ Thus, it is not as pederastic lovers but as friends and equals that they leave.
The genius of Plato is that the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus is the very embodiment of the pure, ameliorating, elevating love of which they speak. And if this love begins as lust, this lust can be refined and sublimed on the ladder of love.
The ladder of love is the heart of Plato’s theory of love. To learn what it is, we must return to the Symposium and Agathon’s drinking party.
Diotima and the Ladder of Love
After Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and the host, Agathon, it is the turn of Socrates to speak in praise of love (at this point, Alcibiades has not yet barged in). Socrates slips into his famous dialectic mode and gets Agathon to agree that if love is not of nothing, then it must be of something, and if it is of something, then it must be of something that is desired, and therefore of something that is lacking.
Socrates then relates a conversation that he once had with a mysterious priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who, he says, taught him the art of love. This Diotima (the name means, ‘Honoured by the gods’)—who may have been a foil for Aspasia of Miletus—told him that the something that Love lacks and desires consists of beautiful and good things, and especially of wisdom, which is both extremely good and extremely beautiful.
If Love lacks and desires beautiful and good things, and if all the gods are good and beautiful, Love cannot, as most people think, be a god. In truth, Love is the child of Poverty and Resource, always in need but always inventive. He is not a god, but a great spirit (daimon) who intermediates between gods and men. As such, he is neither mortal nor immortal, neither wise nor ignorant, but a lover of wisdom (philosophos).
No one who is wise wants to become wise, just as no one who is ignorant wants to become wise: ‘For herein lies the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself…’ The aim of loving beautiful and good things is to possess them, because the possession of good and beautiful things is called happiness, and happiness is an end in itself.
Love is rather like the philosopher himself: neither a god nor a mortal, but a channel between the two; neither wise nor wholly ignorant, but aware of his lack and driven by it. For Plato, desire and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.
Love and Immortality
Wild animals, said Diotima, enter into a state of love because they seek to reproduce and make themselves immortal. People too seek to make themselves immortal, and are prepared to take great risks, even to die, to attain fame and honour. Some people are pregnant in body and beget children who will preserve their memory, but a few are pregnant in soul and instead beget wisdom and virtue. As their children are more beautiful and more immortal, people who are pregnant in soul have more to share with one another, and a stronger bond of friendship between them.
Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory?
For Diotima as for Plato, love is something much larger than sexual or romantic attachment. It is the transcendent force that drives mortal beings to reach beyond their limited selves for the things they lack. It is the engine of art, philosophy, and, of course, of life itself.
The Ladder of Love
Diotima then told Socrates the proper way to learn to love beauty:
A youth should first be taught to love one beautiful body so that he comes to realize that this beautiful body shares beauty with every other beautiful body, and thus that it is foolish to love just one beautiful body. In loving all beautiful bodies, the youth begins to appreciate that the beauty of the soul is superior to the beauty of the body and begins to love those who are beautiful in soul, regardless of whether they are also beautiful in body.
Having thus transcended the physical, he gradually finds that beautiful practices and customs and the various kinds of knowledge also share in a common beauty.
Finally, on the highest rung of the ladder of love, he is able to experience Beauty itself, rather than its various apparitions. By exchanging the various apparitions of virtue for Virtue herself, he gains immortality and the love of the gods.
This is why love is so important, and why it deserves so much praise.
The beautiful youth is not the destination, but only the first rung of the ladder. He is only the apparition of beauty. But if we keep on climbing, we will arrive, first, at the Form of Beauty, and, finally, at the Form of the Good, which is the ultimate source of wisdom, virtue, and happiness. This close association of wisdom, virtue, and happiness is the seed of Aristotle’s virtue ethics.
How the Ladder of Love Changed Love
Before Plato, and for a long time after, people did, of course, fall in love, but they did not believe that this love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today. When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, neither she nor he thought of their attraction as pure or noble or exalting. In the Odyssey, Penelope’s commitment to Odysseus is better understood in terms of dutiful love, or connubial fidelity, than modern, madcap romantic love. When, in the Aeneid, Dido falls in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her passion as a divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. Other models of love in antiquity include the ‘perfect friendship’ of Plato’s student Aristotle and the naturalism, or ‘beastliness’, of the Roman poets Lucretius and Ovid.
On the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, the Jewish and Christian models of love evolved alongside the Greco-Roman ones. In the Old Testament, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his precious son Isaac. But as Abraham is about to slay Isaac, an angel stays his hand. The Sacrifice of Isaac highlights that, although love and morality are important principles, unquestioning obedience to God is more important still, for God is morality, and God is love.
The New Testament, in contrast to the Old, elevates love for one another into the supreme virtue. More than a commandment, love becomes the royal road to redemption. One must even turn the other cheek to love one’s enemies. It is a far cry from the law of retaliation of the Old Testament: ‘…thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth…’
Even so, the Bible, which contains more named characters than Game of Thrones, contains not a single Bridget Jones story. Its greatest human love stories are between two women and two men: Ruth and Naomi, and David and Jonathan.
Jesus may have spoken Greek and might have come under the direct or indirect influence of Platonism. But even if he did not, the later Church sought to align Christian theology with classical philosophy—and Christian love, more properly called charity, and originally directed at God, began to blur with something much more individualistic.
The blending of Christian love with Platonism prepared the ground for the troubadour tradition that began in eleventh century Occitania (broadly, the southern half of France). A troubadour extolled refined or courtly love, which he directed at a married or otherwise unattainable lady, often of a superior rank, as a means of exalting himself and attaining to higher virtue. For the first time, love did not ultimately aim at, or depend on, God—and the Church duly condemned courtly love as a heresy. In a radical cultural reversal, the daughter of Eve turned from devilish temptress to sublime conduit of virtue, an earthly goddess in the place of God.
The troubadour tradition, which had remained an elite and minority movement, died out around the time of the Black Death in 1348, but prepared the ground for the modern conception of romantic love as the only thing left that might save us.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
It is striking that the great thinkers, from Aristotle to Augustine and Mencius to Montaigne, devoted so much of their time and thought to friendship, but almost none of either to marriage. Grayling’s timely treatise reacquaints us with a great but forgotten good that promises to fulfil so many of our practical, intellectual, emotional, and metaphysical needs. The book principally consists of a history of the philosophy of friendship capped by an account of canonical, often homosexual or homosocial friendships such as that of Achilles and Patroclus and Jonathan and David, who, in the Bible, describes the love of Jonathan as “better even than that of women”. Throughout, Grayling seeks to define friendship and, in so doing, explores its many forms, facets, charms, and consolations.
Perhaps in a desire to be modern, relevant, or politic, Grayling seems to reject the classical notion that, at its best and most meaningful, friendship is a highly elitist good. For the greats, only virtuous men can be ideal friends. Aristotle famously says that, while there are many ways for men to be bad, there is only one way for them to be good, and it is precisely in this sense that an ideal friend is ‘another self’—a historically important notion that Grayling severally dismisses. Because they are all one and the same, virtuous men are predictable, reliable, and therefore worthy of one another’s friendship. In contrast, bad people are in some way unlike themselves, and just as likely to hate other bad people as anyone else.
In my opinion, Plato, whom Grayling underrates, advances by far the most subtle and sophisticated of all theories of friendship, one far superior even to that of Aristotle. Despite the extravagant praise that he lavishes upon friendship, Aristotle is quite clear that the best and happiest life is not that spent in friendship, but in the contemplation of those things that are most true and therefore most beautiful and most dependable. There is a contradiction here: if the best life is a life of contemplation, then friendship is either superfluous or inimical to the best life, and therefore undeserving of the high praise that Aristotle lavishes upon it. It may be, as Aristotle tentatively suggests, that friendship is needed because it promotes contemplation, or that contemplation is only possible some of the time and friendship is needed the rest of the time, or even that a life of friendship is just as good as a life of contemplation. So much for Aristotle, one might say.
Plato’s Lysis may seem to fail in its task of defining friendship, but one should never take Plato or his mouthpiece Socrates at face value. There is far more to the Lysis than a couple of interesting but misguided thoughts on friendship. By discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is not only discussing friendship, but also demonstrating to the youths that, even though they count each other as close friends, they do not really know what friendship is, and that, whatever friendship is, it is something far deeper and far more meaningful than the puerile ‘friendship’ that they share. In contrast to the youths, Socrates knows perfectly well what friendship is, and is only feigning ignorance so as to teach the youths: ‘…and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you…’ More than that, by discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is himself in the process of befriending them. He befriends them not with pleasant banter or gossipy chitchat, as most people ‘befriend’ one another, but with the kind of philosophical conversation that is the hallmark of the deepest and most meaningful of friendships. In the course of this philosophical conversation, he tells the youths that he should ‘greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius’, thereby signifying not only that he places friendship on the same high pedestal as philosophy, to which he has devoted (and will sacrifice) his life, but also that the kind of friendship that he has in mind is so rare and uncommon that even he does not possess it. If friendship ultimately escapes definition, then this is because, like philosophy, friendship is not so much a thing-in-itself as it is a process for becoming. True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion. For Plato, friendship and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.
Just as philosophy leads to friendship, so friendship leads to philosophy. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s most important work on friendship (although not generally recognized as such—Grayling fails to mention it), Socrates and Phaedrus go out into the idyllic countryside just outside Athens and have a long conversation about the anatomy of the soul, the nature of true love, the art of persuasion, and the merits of the spoken over the written word. At the end of this conversation, Socrates offers a prayer to the local deities. This is the famous Socratic Prayer, which is notable both in itself and for the response that it elicits from Phaedrus.
Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. —Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.
Phaedrus: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.
Plato may fail to define friendship in the Lysis, but in the Phaedrus he gives us its living embodiment. Socrates and Phaedrus spend their time together enjoying the beautiful Attic countryside while engaging in honest and open philosophical conversation. By exercising and building upon reason, they are not only furthering each other’s understanding, but also transforming a life of friendship into a life of joint contemplation of those things that are most true and hence most beautiful and most dependable. If only on the basis of his response to the Socratic Prayer, it is obvious that Phaedrus is another self to Socrates, since he makes the same choices as Socrates and even justifies making those choices on the grounds that their friendship requires it. Whereas Aristotle and Grayling try to tell us what friendship is, Plato lets us feel it in all its allure and transformative power.
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