If you want to understand true love, ask Kylie Minogue. In an unexpectedly heartbreaking moment during the Australian pop icon’s new Netflix series, Kylie, the 57-year-old opens up about the impact of her relationship with INXS frontman, Michael Hutchence, whom she dated between 1989 and 1991.

“We were good together,” Minogue said of the late musician, who took his own life in 1997 at the age of 37. “Shoulda, woulda, coulda. You know, you go on and live your lives. But it was definitely an amazing point in time. I’ve probably been looking for something like that ever since, and I haven’t got it.”

It’s a quietly devastating moment that the singer appears keen to quickly move past; after getting teary and admitting the couple was a “good team”, she quips: “Anyway, we gotta go past that.” The relationship isn’t revisited in the documentary until later on when Minogue reveals she was told about Hutchence’s death over the phone.

“It might seem disproportionate, the emotion and the memories I have with him and with that time. But I just felt protected and nurtured and valued and believed in,” Minogue recalls before getting emotional, adding, “I always feel he’s with me. You can have relationships – as I have had – with different people, but someone that really just believes in you so much […] he was encouraging me to discover me. F***.”

Minogue’s words about Hutchence make for the standout scenes of the documentary. Rarely do we see a celebrity speak with such raw vulnerability, particularly with regard to romantic relationships. What she says is also deeply relatable: many of us cling to exes from the past, putting them on a pedestal and evangelising that person as the great love of our lives.

We wonder about what could have been, and as new relationships come and go, that feeling sometimes intensifies; we reflect on the past and wonder if we’ll ever find a love like that again. Or perhaps our love quota has been reached, and we must accept the painful reality that everything that follows will only ever pale in comparison.

The problem with subscribing to the idea of having a “great love” is that it inadvertently perpetuates the theory that we have a finite number of meaningful romantic partners. That this kind of transcendental relationship is rare, and can only happen a handful of times.

It’s a narrative we see all the time in pop culture as well as on social media. In Sex and the City, it’s Charlotte York who puts the fear of god in Carrie Bradshaw by saying, “Everyone knows you only get two great loves in your life.”

The statement haunts Carrie, who replies by naming her two significant exes, Aidan and Big, asserting that this must mean that she’s done. Later, she meets a sailor whose prognosis is even worse: you get one great love, if you’re lucky. Carrie resolves that hers must be New York City.

Meanwhile, others subscribe to the thesis that we only fall in love three times: there’s the first love, the hard love that teaches us difficult lessons, and the love that heals us, aka your one true soulmate who adores you unconditionally. It came up in the latest season of Love is Blind, when contestant Alex Henderson said he believes in the idea.

It can create a sense of scarcity, as though there is only one person who truly fits us and everything else is a compromise

Dr Madeleine Mason Roantree, counselling psychologist

But how helpful is it to frame romantic love in these limited terms? Is it even true? Or is it holding us all back in a nostalgia-slash-pop culture-fuelled romantic mythology that is a convenient truth for some, and a harmful myth for others?

“Culturally, we have been primed to believe in singular, defining love stories,” says Dr Madeleine Mason Roantree, a counselling psychologist, who puts much of this theology down to literary love stories.

“It is everywhere,” she says, citing Romeo and Juliet and Cathy and Heathcliffe as prime examples. “They are bound together in a way that feels absolute, even as it is destructive,” Roantree explains. “And The Great Gatsby is essentially about a man who cannot move on from a past love because he believes it was the only one that ever mattered. These stories shape our expectations. They elevate intensity and permanence, and they encourage the idea that the most meaningful love is the one that overwhelms us.”

Still, the conditioning runs deep. And it can be hard to shake, despite there being absolutely no scientific or psychological evidence to prove any of this.

“What we do know is that people are capable of forming multiple deep attachments across their lives,” explains Roantree. “The relationships that feel most significant are often those that happen at formative moments, or those that involve intensity, loss, or unfinished endings. That is part of why they stay with us. We are not just remembering the person, we are remembering who we were at the time and what the relationship represented.”

Where this gets tricky is how it impacts our expectations around romantic love moving forward. We arrive at Hinge dates expecting to be swept off our feet by our one true love. The inevitable reality, then (making small talk with a total stranger), feels like a complete waste of time.

“It can create a sense of scarcity, as though there is only one person who truly fits us and everything else is a compromise,” explains Roantree. “That can lead people to idealise past relationships, particularly if they ended abruptly or tragically. Over time, those relationships can become polished in memory, and new partners are then compared to something that is not entirely real.”

Another important facet to point out in all this is age. Often, the people we uphold as the loves of our life are those we met when we were young – Minogue, for example, was 21 when she started dating Hutchence.

As obvious as it may sound, people want different things from romantic love in their twenties compared to what they want in their thirties and beyond. “The partner I needed at 25 need not have understood parenting or pensions; at 60 I’m less impressed by someone’s music collection,” says Dr Sally Austen, consultant clinical psychologist. “As we age, we do not just relate to that one person. We need to be able to form relationships with their parents, colleagues, and children. I don’t doubt that each of us will have a person whom we most voraciously, sensuously, adventureously loved; but I think they most likely suited that time and place, only.”

In other words, perhaps the truth is that while there might be one great love who is perfect for us at a particular point in time, it’s completely possible that there will be another great love who comes along that suits the version of who we are at another stage in our lives, and even another one after that. To think that this is a limited process is likely only to cause us pain down the line.

“We are capable of experiencing meaningful love more than once, but it will not look the same each time,” says Roantree. “I would say the idea persists because it is emotionally satisfying and culturally reinforced, but in practice it can keep people looking backwards, rather than allowing themselves to experience what is actually in front of them.”