Made from the same stone

There are photographs that make us believe two people belong together long before we know their story. When I first saw Matty Healy and Gabriette Bechtel¹’s wedding photographs, that was exactly the feeling they left me with. In fact, it wasn’t even the wedding itself. From the very first image I ever saw of them together, something simply clicked. They looked inevitable. But how can a couple I’ve never met leave me with such certainty?

Why do some couples seem like soulmates before we know anything about them? What is it that convinces us so instantly? Is it love we think we’re witnessing or are we projecting something else entirely onto the image before us.

In Plato’s Symposium², Aristophanes tells of a time when humans were not quite human as we know them. They were round, almost otherworldly creatures, with four arms, four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions. Complete within themselves, they grew powerful enough to challenge the gods.

Zeus, rather than destroying them altogether, chose a more calculated punishment. He split each being in two. Since then, every half has been left searching for the part that was once missing from its world, its other half.

Matty and Gabriette are exactly what I think of when I hear this story. Two people living different lives, with different experiences and different references, who somehow ended up being shaped by many of the same things.

They don’t need to copy each other to look like they belong together. It isn’t visual matching, it’s aesthetic compatibility.

They both have that slightly jaded, artistic, nocturnal quality, the kind of downtown person who listens to too much music and probably has too many opinions about it. Their styles aren’t the same. Their taste in the world is.

They pull from many of the same references, 70s, 80s and 90s rock, indie sleaze³, punk, vintage Americana, a little bit of trashy glamour. But they translate them differently. Gaby turns them into something feminine, siren-like and deliberately sexy. Matty takes the same ingredients and makes them boyish, rock n roll and slightly intellectual.

The result isn’t that they look alike, it’s that they make sense next to each other.

But it doesn’t always work that way. Does two people’s matching aesthetic have to click instantly? Not necessarily.

Two people can be carved from the same stone and still take completely different shapes. They can share references, instincts, even the same sensibility, without necessarily belonging together, because similarity isn’t the same thing as compatibility.

The same stone doesn’t even have to mean fashion. Two people can come from similar upbringings, take similar paths through life and still give off that strange sense that they were always supposed to meet. Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber⁴ are probably one of the clearest examples.

They were genuinely at the same level of fame. This wasn’t just another celebrity relationship. They were the biggest boy and the biggest girl of their generation, faces that seemed to exist everywhere, from magazine covers to songs on the radio. When they got together, it almost felt like two fictional universes crossing over.

More than anything, they were coming of age at the same time. There was something inherently romantic about watching two people grow up in public, side by side. The innocent teenage heartthrob and Disney’s sweetheart, both becoming adults in front of the same audience.

While Matty and Gabriette meet at an aesthetic eye-level, Justin and Selena met at a cultural one.

Their story started to resemble the kind of love story you would normally only find in fiction and that might be exactly why people have had such a hard time letting it go.

As outsiders, we can try to look at their relationship rationally, but we don’t actually know what happened between them. What we do know is the picture they created. And that picture made an almost perfect amount of sense.

Our brains are very good at taking incomplete stories and filling in the gaps with patterns we already recognise. At some point, you stop thinking, “this is their story”, and start thinking, “I know how this story is supposed to end”.

In Selena and Justin’s case, there were so many elements of the classic great love story, two young stars, growing up together, separating, finding each other again, becoming adults alongside one another, that an ending almost seemed inevitable.

And that’s where narrative coherence⁵ becomes dangerous. We start mistaking a story that makes sense, for a story that must be true. Perhaps that is why so many people still can’t quite let Selena and Justin go. Not necessarily because they believe those two belong together, but because the story we built around them never got the end we were expecting.

The realest stories don’t necessarily make sense straight away. Where there is a spark, a fire can still start.

I think the ideas of “love at first sight” and “if you know, you know” come partly from a time when people tended to marry much younger. Marriage was often shaped by family, religion, social expectations or simply practical considerations. Of course, there are countless stories of great love within those marriages, but many people didn’t enter marriage after years of dating, self-discovery and figuring out what kind of person they were actually compatible with.

We are privileged to live at a time where, for many of us, there is room to find the right person rather than simply find a person. We can date before committing. We can leave when something doesn’t work. We can stay single for a few years. We can meet people far outside the circles we grew up in. We can choose not to get married at all.

So if you meet someone and there is a spark, you don’t necessarily have to decide what it means.

A relationship can develop its own shape over time. You start picking up each other’s expressions, phrases and inside jokes. You show each other music, films, books, places and artists you might never have discovered on your own. You experience things together that slowly become part of both of you.

You can be made from the same stone and still need to be shaped. Not because one of you has to become someone else, but because two people can slowly, almost imperceptibly, shape a space that fits them both.

And maybe that is just as romantic as knowing from the beginning.