The Future Of Relationships - Why Soul Mate is not the answer - with Dr. Marc Gafni
Begins Sunday, June 8th 2025
Unique Self 2.0 Portal 3
Course Description
The Future of Relationships: From Rolemate to Whole Mate
This course explores the evolutionary arc of human intimacy through three foundational forms of relationship: Role Mate, Soul mate, and Whole Mate. Beginning with the ontology of relationship itself, we investigate how roles shape our identities and interactions—not just with others, but with life, the cosmos, and the divine. The Role Mate is often dismissed or undervalued, yet it forms the crucial infrastructure of relational life. Week one sets the ground for understanding this layer of connection, where self and society meet through structure, function, and context.
In week two, we move into the deep waters of the Soul Mate—our cultural ideal of love, passion, and resonance. While this level of intimacy captures the imagination and yearning of our age, it is also the site of great disillusionment. We’ll unpack why the Soul Mate paradigm, when treated as the final goal, inevitably fails. This failure is not a sign of weakness but a gateway into the next evolutionary stage. The tragic beauty of the Soul Mate sets the stage for a wider embrace, pointing toward a more integrated and sustainable form of love.
Week three culminates in the emergence of the Whole Mate: a post-tragic structure of intimacy that includes and transcends both Role Mate and Soul Mate. Here, we reimagine the self, the beloved, and the cosmos through the lens of wholeness. Whole Mate relationships offer not just personal fulfillment but a blueprint for addressing the larger metacrisis—a breakdown in connection at every level of life. By understanding and embodying these three dimensions of love, participants will gain a new language and lived experience of intimacy that is mystical, embodied, and urgently relevant.
Our Schedule
3 Two-hour Zoom Classes/ 3 Digital Campfires
Begins Sunday, June 8th, 2025
Times: Sunday 11am PST (Los Angeles), 2pm EST (New York), 8pm CET (Paris)
Class 1: June 8• Role Mate
Class 2: June 15• Soul Mate
Class 3: June 22 • Whole Mate
Campfires: Saturdays following the course (see below)
Price: €300€/100€ Tiers
*Tickets include a free month membership to the online community “One Mountain/Many Paths”
Soul mate by itself never works!
This is heretical. We've discarded all gods except Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to whom we offer the libation of the Soul Mate. Yet, Aphrodite rejects this offering, and no one dares to speak this truth aloud. Challenging the Soul Mate is considered heresy, punishable by metaphorical burning at the stake.
But you and I both know that >Soul Mate by itself doesn't work. Let's be blunt: there's a moment when you're bored, gazing into your beloved's eyes for extended periods. Please don't say it aloud; don't tell anyone. But why? There's something wrong with the Soul Mate story that no one will acknowledge. This leads to a crisis of intimacy, which is a crisis of relationship and love, and is fundamentally the root of the metacrisis.
Why is Soul Mate tragic? Because there's so much pain and misery, because we're reaching for something that's not the right thing. It's not the holy grail.
The poet Robert Browning said, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for?" We must reach for the right thing. We're seeking love in all the wrong places.
Soul Mate by itself cannot work. No amount of therapy, reading, self-help literature, or mystical practice will change that.
- Dr. Marc Gafni
COURSE CONTENT
Class I: Role Mate
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, June 8, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, June 14, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Description:
Role Mate is the foundation of relational identity, where we connect through social functions, responsibilities, and expected roles—necessary, structured, and often overlooked in its subtle depth.
Key Themes:
Understanding Role Mates and their function in relationships and culture
Exploring how these underlying and traditional roles function in the fabric of our lives
How to transcend and include the Role Mate function
Practices:
Inquiry into our inherited roles
Inquiry into how to include and transcend them
Campfire discussions
Class II: Soul Mate
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, June 15, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, June 21, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Description:
Soul Mate is the passionate, intimate connection of shared depth and resonance, but when it is idolized as the final destination, it cannot take us home.
Key Themes:
Understanding Soul Mates and their function in relationships and culture
Exploring the possibilities and limitations of Soul Mates
How to transcend and include the Soul Mate function
Practices:
Inquiry into the myth of the Soul Mate
Inquiry into how we transcend and include Soul Mates
Campfire discussions
Class III – Whole mate
Lecture and Q&A: Sunday, June 22, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Digital Campfire: Saturday, June 28, 11 am PST (Los Angeles), 2 pm EST (New York), 8 pm CET (Paris)
Description:
Whole Mate is the post-tragic evolution of love, integrating both role and soul into a higher, fuller structure of intimacy that responds to the personal and planetary metacrisis.
Key Themes:
Understanding the participatory universe and the Infinite Intimate
Connecting personal transformation to global challenges
Embodying Homo Amor as a response to existential risk
Practices:
Inquiry into the highest possibility of our unique story
Inquiry into our unique role in addressing existential risk
Campfire discussions
About your Teacher
Dr. Marc Gafni
Dr. Marc Gafni is a visionary thinker, social activist, and passionate philosopher. He is known for his ‘source code teachings,’ including Unique Self theory, the Five Selves, the Amorous Cosmos, A Politics of Evolutionary Love, A Return to Eros and Digital Intimacy. He is author of over twenty-five books, including the award-winning Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, as well as Orthodox rabbinic ordination.
He teaches on the cutting edge of philosophy and spirit in the West, with the aim of participating in the articulation of what Dr. Gafni, together with Dr. Zak Stein and colleagues, are calling CosmoErotic Humanism. At the core of CosmoErotic Humanism is what Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein are calling ‘First Principles and First Values,’ ‘Anthro-Ontology,’ and a ‘Universal Grammar of Value.’ This shared story rooted in First Principles and First Values can then serve as the matrix for a global ethos for a global civilization.
Dr. Gafni is the Co-Founder and Co-President of the Office for the Future, the Center for World Religion and Philosophy and the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. At the core of their shared missions is the articulation and delivery into culture of a Great Library - in multiple forms - which participates in evolving the source code of consciousness and culture in response to the Meta Crisis.