Lexicon ·
meant to be
verb phrase, passive
- Stated meaning
- That two people were destined for each other, and the relationship confirms something already decided.
- Operating meaning
- Hands the decision to fate, so that neither party owns the effort it takes or the exit.
- Origin
- An idiom for destiny, most at home after the fact, in “it wasn’t meant to be.” The dating economy turned it around and uses it as a forecast.
September 18, by text, from a friend, while comparing notes on our dating lives: “I’m at a point that if it’s meant to be with someone, it will be.” It was offered as frustration at not having found anyone yet. The phrase was used.
“Meant to be” is passive, and the passive is the point. Something meant it, and the sentence declines to say what. The oldest versions name the agent. In Plato’s Symposium (opens in a new window), Aristophanes has Zeus cut the first humans in half, and each half spends its life looking for the other. In the Talmud (opens in a new window), a heavenly voice announces the match 40 days before a child is formed, and Yiddish has a word for the person announced, bashert. Ordinary English dropped the agent and kept the verdict. “It wasn’t meant to be” is said by the people something ended on, and it spares everyone an account of why.
The market turned the phrase around and sold it forward. In the Google Books corpus (opens in a new window), “meant to be together” appears 350 times as often in 2019 as in 1950, and most of the climb came after 1990. Apps rank profiles by compatibility and present one a day as the likeliest match. A second shelf sells horoscopes, and a third teaches readers to manifest a partner by describing them in the present tense. The three products share one promise: the right person arrives, and recognizing them is the only work required.
Under load, the phrase makes effort evidence against itself. Whoever proposes a plan is forcing it and whoever waits is trusting it, so 2 people who both believe it both wait. Something meant to be that does not happen was, by the same logic, never meant to be. The phrase can’t be wrong in either direction.
This file is the other arm of the trial. Nothing in it was left to fate. Of the $2,570.94 I spent in 120 days with A., $1,228.94 bought no date at all. It went on arranging for something to happen, 47.8 percent of the arc, and it has brought me to the point my friend texted from, by the opposite route.