Soames Forsyte doesn’t fall in love. He acquires.
That’s the reading most fans of PBS Masterpiece’s The Forsytes arrive at within the first two episodes, and it’s not a lazy one. Joshua Orpin plays him with a stillness that reads as control rather than coldness, a man running numbers behind his eyes even while proposing marriage. Soames talks about Irene the way his father James talks about consols and railway stock. He doesn’t wonder if she loves him back. He wonders if the position is secure.
That distinction matters more than it looks. It’s the difference between wanting something and needing to own it so nobody else can take it away. Psychologists have a name for the second impulse, and it explains a lot more about Soames, and about anyone who has ever sat at a card table refusing to fold a losing hand, than most character write-ups give it credit for.
The Man Who Can’t Stand to Lose Anything
Here’s the thing about Soames that the show keeps circling back to: he isn’t chasing pleasure. He’s avoiding loss. Watch how he negotiates the Bosinney commission, how he treats the house at Robin Hill as a monument to a marriage he can feel slipping, how every scene with Irene plays less like romance and more like a man checking that his collateral hasn’t depreciated. According to EBSCO’s character analysis of the Forsyte Saga, Soames’s entire arc is built around property, possession, and the terror of control slipping away from him. That’s not a coincidence of Victorian melodrama. It’s a documented pattern in human decision-making.
Behavioral economists call it loss aversion, and the research behind it is a lot sturdier than a single TV recap. A large-scale replication published through Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health confirmed the core finding that people feel the pain of losing something roughly twice as intensely as they feel the pleasure of gaining an equivalent thing. Soames isn’t a villain because he’s greedy. He’s frightening because he’s rational in exactly the way the theory predicts: overprotect what you have, even at the cost of the person standing in front of you.
Where That Same Wiring Shows Up at the Card Table
The same bias that turns Soames into Victorian London’s most uncomfortable husband is the exact one that separates a disciplined poker player from a broke one. A player who’s up for the session and terrified of giving it back will make worse decisions than a player who never checked the stack size at all. That’s loss aversion doing what it does best, and the players who last are the ones who’ve trained themselves to feel it and override it anyway. It’s not that they don’t feel the pull of a bad beat. It’s that they’ve built a system to stop the pull from making the next decision for them.
That discipline is exactly why serious players are so particular about where they actually sit down to play. Bankroll management means nothing if the platform itself is the risk, and the rooms most consistently reported by pokertube as favoured by tighter, more calculating players tend to be the ones with transparent structures, fast cashouts, and no surprises buried in the terms. It’s the same instinct Soames has about his stock positions. Know exactly what you’re holding, and never let the sentiment of the moment cloud the math underneath it.
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Loss Aversion Is Why Soames Never Just Walks Away
Prospect theory, the framework Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky built to explain exactly this kind of behavior, doesn’t just say people dislike losing. It says people will take on extra risk specifically to avoid locking in a loss they’ve already half-accepted. The Nielsen Norman Group’s breakdown of prospect theory puts it plainly: framing matters more than the actual numbers. A person who feels like they’re already losing will gamble harder to escape that feeling, not less.
Watch Soames through that lens and the whole marriage recontextualizes. He isn’t holding on to Irene because the relationship is working. He’s holding on because letting go would mean admitting the investment failed, and admitting failure is the one move loss-averse people are built to avoid. Simply Psychology’s explainer on loss aversion bias notes that this asymmetry shows up everywhere from stock portfolios to relationships people should have ended years earlier. Soames just happens to be a stockbroker running both experiments at once.
Variety’s recent review of the new adaptation points out that this version leans harder into Soames’s interiority than earlier adaptations did, letting Orpin play the character as someone genuinely confused about why control isn’t the same thing as love. That confusion is the whole tragedy. He thinks he’s protecting an asset. He’s actually driving away the one thing that was never his to hold in the first place.
The Uncomfortable Case for Soames Being Right, Sometimes
Here’s an unpopular take. Soames isn’t wrong about everything. His instinct to protect what he’s built, to treat commitments seriously, to refuse to be swept along by whatever everyone else in the room is feeling in the moment, isn’t inherently a character flaw. It’s the same discipline that keeps a trader solvent during a crash. The BE Hub’s reference entry on loss aversion frames it as neither good nor bad on its own. It’s a tool. The problem is entirely about where you point it.
Soames points it at a person. That’s the failure. A poker player who applies the same wariness to a bet sizing decision is using the bias correctly. A husband who applies it to his wife’s autonomy is not. The Forsytes works as drama precisely because Soames never learns the difference, and the show is smart enough to never let him off the hook for it.
For a fandom that’s spent two seasons debating whether Soames deserves sympathy, that’s the more interesting question than whether he’s a villain. He’s not irrational. He’s rational in exactly the way the research says people are, applied to the one place rationality does the most damage.
What Fans Keep Getting Wrong About Him
The temptation is to read Soames as simply cold, a man incapable of feeling. That misses it entirely. He feels plenty. He feels the threat of loss constantly, acutely, in a way that drives nearly every choice he makes from Episode One onward. That’s not the absence of emotion. It’s a very specific, very well-documented emotional bias running the show behind a placid Victorian face.
Readers who want more on how the cast is building out these performances should check the profile on Joshua Orpin, which traces how he approached Soames’s stillness as a deliberate choice rather than a limitation. There’s also a strong case for reading it alongside the profile of Francesca Annis, whose decades of scene-partner work with difficult, controlled characters gives useful context for how a cast this disciplined builds tension without raising its voice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Soames Forsyte meant to be a sympathetic character or a villain? The show deliberately sits in between. Soames is written to be understood, not excused. His possessiveness comes from a real psychological pattern rather than pure malice, which makes him harder to dismiss than a straightforward antagonist would be.
What is loss aversion, in simple terms? It’s a well-documented bias where people feel the pain of losing something roughly twice as strongly as the pleasure of gaining something equivalent. It explains why people cling to bad investments, bad relationships, or bad poker hands longer than logic suggests they should.
Did the real Forsyte Saga novels explore this same psychology? Yes. John Galsworthy’s original novels built Soames around property and possession decades before behavioral economics had a name for the pattern, which is part of why the character still holds up under modern psychological analysis.
Why do critics keep comparing Soames to a stockbroker even outside the office scenes? Because Galsworthy wrote him that way on purpose. Soames applies the exact same risk calculus to marriage that he applies to a bond position, and the show’s writers, including Debbie Horsfield in this adaptation, keep that throughline visible in nearly every scene.
Does understanding loss aversion change how you watch the show? For most viewers, yes. Once you see Soames’s behavior as a specific bias rather than generic coldness, his scenes with Irene read less like villainy and more like a slow-motion demonstration of a decision-making trap most people recognize from their own lives.
The Forsytes keeps returning to the same question with each episode: is Soames a monster, or is he simply a man running the numbers the only way he knows how, and getting the equation catastrophically wrong the one time it actually mattered.