The Soulmate: A Novel

In the Acknowledgements that follow the novel, Hepworth shares that she began The Soulmate during the COVID-19 pandemic, inspired by conversations she had with friends about marriage as the pandemic put relationships under a new kind of strain. They discussed “the bad and good sides of marriage. What we bring to it. What it brings out in us” (325). Hepworth uses Pippa’s and Amanda’s marriages to explore what the different women value and need in their marriages. Their marriages couldn’t be more different on the surface—Amanda’s marriage is what she calls “an arrangement,” while Pippa’s marriage is based on an ideal of romantic love. The novel shows that both women will come to accept that their models of marriage are illusory in different ways. The novel suggests that loyalty is fundamental to a successful marriage: Both women’s marriage stories uphold their belief in the importance of loyalty, showing it to be present in Amanda’s but not in Pippa’s. This irony is key to the parallel created by these two marriages and to the novel’s subversion of expectations around which is the stronger.

The novel creates an unconventional marriage model in Amanda and Max’s relationship. Amanda has specifically designed and lived her marriage to avoid being like her mother. She doesn’t want to have the same type of marriage that her parents had, in which her father’s infidelity was ignored and denied—she doesn’t want to feel the shame she remembers seeing on her mother’s face. Instead, she enters into a relationship with Max for practical reasons. She can see that Max needs someone to provide the functions of a wife who is also “someone he could trust” (87). She decides on an “exchange of loyalty for fidelity” (136) and remains loyal to Max through even illegal activities and danger (136). When she believes that Max had sex with Pippa, she sees it as the destruction of their agreement and thus of their marriage. Infidelity, a lapse in loyalty, is a deal-breaker for Amanda, and drives her to The Drop on the night of her death, looking for answers from Pippa. Max is loyal, however, and the novel suggests that Amanda’s fatal mistake is to wrongly believe that Max has cheated on her and not to seek answers directly from him, a form of emotional disloyalty that indirectly leads to her death.

Pippa also centers loyalty in her marriage explicitly: “Gabe and I have always agreed on our nonnegotiable. Loyalty” (128). Loyalty is Pippa’s touchstone and the reason why she remains with Gabe despite their often-chaotic life and relationship: The novel explores the personal dangers of seeing love as unconditional. It is also the reason that it hurts Pippa so badly when Gabe cheats on her: “Our one nonnegotiable had always been loyalty. And what was infidelity if not a lapse in loyalty” (128). Despite repeated evidence, Pippa doesn’t recognize that the loyalty she prizes in her marriage is one-sided until near the end of the novel. Her character resolution hinges on her realization that Gabe has used her for cover: “He wasn’t protecting me—he was protecting himself!” (306). When Pippa admits to herself that the loyalty in her marriage is not reciprocal and, as such, the marriage is damaging to her, she is free to seek happiness for herself.

The truth of this realization in the novel’s moral structure is demonstrated by Amanda’s rare agreement with Pippa on this point. Her narrative voice, speaking with the authority of the dead, says, “The pair of them pride themselves on loyalty, as if it’s all they could possibly need for a good marriage. They forget the most important thing about loyalty: Sometimes it’s warranted…sometimes it’s not” (86). Amanda’s words show that Pippa has made a poor judgment when investing her loyalty in Gabe. Although there are vast differences between the two women and their marriages, with them, Hepworth highlights the importance of mutual loyalty as a foundation of marriage.