In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes accounts for this feeling of familiarity by claiming that the loved one was our long-lost “other half ” to whose body our own had originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs, and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half—and from that day, every man and woman has yearned nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part
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