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How to Pick Y our Life Partner   Part 1 Valentine‘s Day is really two holidays bundled up in one. For people in a relationship, it‘s Celebrate Your Relationship Day.For single people, it‘s You‘re Alone and Unloved Again This Year Aren‘t You Day.It‘s the one holiday that acti vely taunts an entire group of people.  Christmas used to make Jewish children cry until the first half of the 20th Century, when Hanukkahturned into Jewish Christmas and solved the problem. And patriotic holidays like Thanksgiving and Columbus Day will always cause a few tantrums because they happen to celebrate genocide. But only Valentine‘s Day causes mass depression. Of course, many single people are perfectly happy with their lives and ignore Valentine‘s Day altogether, but to a large number of frustrated singles, Valentine‘s Day feels like this:  And at first glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are on average happier than single people and much happier than divorced people. 1  But a closer analysis reveals

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How to Pick Your Life Partner  – 

Part 1

Valentine‘s Day is really two holidays bundled up in one. For people in a relationship, it‘s

―Celebrate Your Relationship Day.‖ For single people, it‘s ―You‘re Alone and Unloved Again This

Year Aren‘t You Day.‖ It‘s the one holiday that actively taunts an entire group of people. 

Christmas used to make Jewish children cry until the first half of the 20th Century, when

Hanukkahturned into Jewish Christmas and solved the problem. And patriotic holidays like

Thanksgiving and Columbus Day will always cause a few tantrums because they happen to

celebrate genocide. But only Valentine‘s Day causes mass depression.

Of course, many single people are perfectly happy with their lives and ignore Valentine‘s Day

altogether, but to a large number of frustrated singles, Valentine‘s Day feels like this: 

And at first glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are on average

happier than single people and much happier than divorced people.1 But a closer analysis reveals

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So how big a deal is it?

Well, start by subtracting your age from 90. If you live a long life, that‘s about the number of years

you‘re going to spend with your current or future life partner, give or take a few.

I‘m pretty sure no one over 80 reads Wait But Why (Nana notwithstanding), so no matter who youare, that‘s a lot  of time — and almost the entirety of the rest of your one existence.

(Sure, people get divorced, but you don‘t think you will. A recent study shows that 86% of young

 people assume their current or future marriage will be forever, and I doubt older people feel much

differently. So we‘ll proceed under that assumption.) 

And when you choose a life partner, you‘re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting

 partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about

20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and

retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you‘ll hear about 18,000 times. 

Intense shit.

So given that this is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible

that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up choosing a life partnership that leaves

them dissatisfied and unhappy?

Well as it turns out, there are a bunch of factors working against us:

People tend to be bad at knowing what they want from a relationship 

Studies have shown people to be generally bad, as single people, at predicting what later turn out to

 be their actual relationship preferences. One study found that speed daters questioned about their

relationship preferences usually prove themselves wrong just minutes later with what they show to

 prefer in the actual event.4 

This shouldn‘t be a surprise—in life, you usually don‘t get good at something until you‘ve done it a

 bunch of times. Unfortunately, not many people have a chance to be in more than a few, if any,

serious relationships before they make their big decision. There‘s just not enough time. And given

that a person‘s partnership persona and relationship needs are often quite different from the way

they are as a single person, it‘s hard as a single person to really know what you want or need from arelationship.

Society has it all wrong and gives us terrible advice 

→ Society encourages us to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide. 

If you‘re running a business, conventional wisdom states that you‘re a much more effective

 business owner if you study business in school, create well thought-out business plans, and analyze

your business‘s performance diligently. This is logical, because that‘s the way you proceed when

you want to do something well and minimize mistakes.

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But if someone went to school to learn about how to pick a life partner and take part in a healthy

relationship, if they charted out a detailed plan of action to find one, and if they kept their progress

organized rigorously in a spreadsheet, society says they‘re A) an over -rational robot, B) way too

concerned about this, and C) a huge weirdo.

 No, when it comes to dating, society frowns upon thinking too much about it, instead opting for

things like relying on fate, going with your gut, and hoping for the best. If a business owner took

society‘s dating advice for her business, she‘d probably fail, and if she succeeded, it would be

 partially due to good luck  —and that‘s how society wants us to approach dating. 

→ Society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search for potential partners. 

In a study on what governs our dating choices more, our preferences or our current opportunities,

opportunities wins hands down — our dating choices are ―98% percent a response…to market

conditions and just 2 percent immutable desires. Proposals to date tall, short, fat, thin, professional,clerical, educated, uneducated people are all more than nine-tenths governed by what‘s on offer that

night.‖5 

In other words, people end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how

 poorly matched they might to be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that

outside of serious socialites, everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot of online

dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way.

But good old society frowns upon that, and people are often still timid to say they met their spouse

on a dating site. The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck, by bumping into them

randomly or being introduced to them from within your little pool. Fortunately, this stigma is

diminishing with time, but that it‘s there at all is  a reflection of how illogical the socially accepted

dating rulebook is.

→ Society rushes us. 

In our world, the major rule is to get married before you‘re too old—and ―too old‖ varies from 25 –  

35, depending on where you live. The rule should be ―whatever you do, don‘t marry the wrong

 person,‖ but society frowns much more upon a 37-year-old single person than it does an unhappily

married 37-year-old with two children. It makes no sense — the former is one step away from a

happy marriage, while the latter must either settle for permanent unhappiness or endure a messy

divorce just to catch up to where the single person is.

Our Biology Is Doing Us No Favors 

→ Human biology evolved a long time ago and doesn’t understand the concept of having a

deep connection with a life partner for 50 years. 

When we start seeing someone and feel the slightest  twinge of excitement, our biology gets into

―okay let‘s do this‖ mode and bombards us with chemicals designed to get us to mate (lust), fall in

love (the Honeymoon Phase), and then commit for the long run (attachment). Our brains can

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usually override this process if we‘re just not that into someone, but for all those middle ground

cases where the right move is probably to move on and find something better, we often succumb to

the chemical roller coaster and end up getting engaged.

→ Biological clocks are a bitch. 

For a woman who wants to have biological children with her husband, she has one very reallimitation in play, which is the need to pick the right life partner by forty, give or take. This is just a

shitty fact and makes an already hard process one notch more stressful. Still, if it were me, I‘d

rather adopt children with the right life partner than have biological children with the wrong one.

 ___________________

So when you take a bunch of people who aren‘t that good at knowing what they want in a

relationship, surround them with a society that tells them they have to find a life partner but that

they should under-think, under-explore, and hurry up, and combine that with biology that drugs usas we try to figure it out and promises to stop producing children before too long, what do you get?

A frenzy of big decisions for bad reasons and a lot of people messing up the most important

decision of their life. Let‘s take a look at some of the common types of people who fall victim to all

of this and end up in unhappy relationships:

Overly Romantic Ronald 

Overly Romantic Ronald‘s downfall is believing that love is enough reason on its own to marry

someone. Romance can be a great part of a relationship, and love is a key ingredient in a happy

marriage, but without a bunch of other important things, it‘s simply not enough. 

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Externally-Influenced Ed lets other people play way too big a part in the life partner decision. The

choosing of a life partner is deeply personal, enormously complicated, different for everyone, and

almost impossible to understand from the outside, no matter how well you know someone. As such,

other people‘s opinions and preferences really have no  place getting involved, other than an

extreme case involving mistreatment or abuse.The saddest example of this is someone breaking up with a person who would have been the right

life partner because of external disapproval or a factor the chooser doesn‘t actually care about

(religion is a common one) but feels compelled to stick to for the sake of family insistence or

expectations.

It can also happen the opposite way, where everyone in someone‘s life is thrilled with his

relationship because it looks great from the outside, and even though it‘s not actually that great

from the inside, Ed listens to others over his own gut and ties the knot.

Shallow Sharon 

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Shallow Sharon is more concerned with the on-paper description of her life partner than the inner

 personality beneath it. There are a bunch of boxes that she needs to have checked — things like his

height, job prestige, wealth-level, accomplishments, or maybe a novelty item like being foreign or

having a specific talent.

Everyone has certain on- paper boxes they‘d like checked, but a strongly ego-driven person

 prioritizes appearances and résumés above even the quality of her connection with her potential life

 partner when weighing things.

If you want a fun new term, a significant other whom you suspect was chosen more because of the

 boxes they checked than for their personality underneath is a ―scantron boyfriend‖ or a ―scantron

wife,‖ etc. I‘ve gotten some good mileage out of that one.

Selfish Stanley 

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The selfish come in three, sometimes-overlapping varieties:

1) The “My Way or the Highway” Type 

This person cannot handle sacrifice or compromise. She believes her needs and desires and opinions

are simply mor e important than her partner‘s, and she needs to get her way in almost any big

decision. In the end, she doesn‘t want a legitimate partnership, she wants to keep her single life and

have someone there to keep her company.

This person inevitably ends up with at best a super easy-going person, and at worst, a pushover with

a self-esteem issue, and sacrifices a chance to be part of a team of equals, almost certainly limiting

the potential quality of her marriage.

2) The Main Character 

The Main Character‘s tragic flaw is being massively self-absorbed. He wants a life partner who

serves as both his therapist and biggest admirer, but is mostly uninterested in returning either favor.

Each night, he and his partner discuss their days, but 90% of the discussion centers around his

day —after all, he‘s the main character of the relationship. The issue for him is that by being

incapable of tearing himself away from his personal world, he ends up with a sidekick as his life

 partner, which makes for a pretty boring 50 years.

3) The Needs-Driven 

Everyone has needs, and everyone likes those needs to be met, but problems arise when the meeting

of needs —she cooks for me, he‘ll be a great father, she‘ll make a great wife, he‘s rich, she keeps me

organized, he‘s great in bed—  becomes the main grounds for choosing someone as a life partner.Those listed things are all great perks, but that‘s all they are—  perks. And after a year of marriage,

when the needs-driven person is now totally accustomed to having her needs met and it‘s no longer

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exciting, there better be a lot more good parts of the relationship she‘s chosen or she‘s in for a dull

ride.

 ___________________

The main reason most of the above types end up in unhappy relationships is that they‘re consumed

 by a motivating force that doesn‘t take into account the reality of what a life partnership is and what

makes it a happy thing.

Often, the key to succeeding at something big is to break it into its tiniest pieces and focus

on how to succeed at just one piece.

When we examined  procrastination, we talked about how a great achievement is just what a

long series of unremarkable tasks looks like from far away. In the pixel post, we looked at a

human life up close and saw that it was just an ordinary Wednesday, again and again and

again—and that achieving life happiness was all about learning to be happy on a routine

weekday.

I think the same idea applies to marriage .

From afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a book or a movie.

 And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a whole. 

But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad

summations—we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s

where our happiness is determined.

So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at

marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000

mundane Wednesdays.

Marriage isn’t the honeymoon in Thailand—it’s day four of vacation #56 that you take

together. Marriage is not celebrating the closing of the deal on the first house—it’s having

dinner in that house for the 4,386th time. And it’s certainly not Valentine’s Day. 

Marriage is Forgettable Wednesday. Together.

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So I’ll leave the butterflies and the kisses in the rain and the twice-a-day sex to you—you’ll

work that part out I’m sure—and spend this post trying to figure out the best way to make

Forgettable Wednesday as happy as possible.

To endure 20,000 days with another human being and do so happily, there are three key

ingredients necessary:

1) An Epic Friendship 

I enjoy spending time with most of my friends—that’s why they’re my friends. But with

certain friends, the time is so high-quality, so interesting, and so fun that they pass the

Traffic Test.

The Traffic Test is passed when I’m finishing up a hangout with someone and one of us is

driving the other back home or back to their car, and I find myself rooting for traffic. That’s

how much I’m enjoying the time with them. 

Passing the Traffic Test says a lot. It means I’m lost in the interaction, invigorated by it,

and that I’m the complete opposite of bored. 

To me, almost nothing is more critical in choosing a life partner than finding someone who

passes the Traffic Test. When there are people in your life who do pass the Traffic Test,

what a whopping shame it would be to spend 95% of the rest of your life with someone

who doesn’t. 

A Traffic Test-passing friendship entails:

  A great sense of humor click . No one wants to spend 50 years fake laughing.

  Fun. And the ability to extract fun out of unfun situations — airport delays, long drives,

errands. Not surprisingly, studies suggest that the amount of fun a couple has is a strong

 predictor for their future.6 

  A respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking. A life partner doubles as a

career/life therapist, and if you don‘t respect the way someone thinks, you‘re not going to

want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting that popsinto your head, because you won‘t really care that much what they have to say about it.

  A decent number of common interests, activities, and people-preferences. Otherwise a lot

of what makes you ‗you‘ will inevitably become a much smaller part of your life, and you

and your life partner will struggle to find enjoyable ways to spend a free Saturday together.

A friendship that passes the Traffic Test gets better and better with time, and it has

endless room to deepen and grow ever-richer.

2) A Feeling of Home 

If someone told you you had to sit in a chair for 12 straight hours without moving, aside

from wondering why the hell they were making you do this, your first thought would be, “I

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better get in the most comfortable possible position”—because you’d know that even

the slightest bit of discomfort would grow to pain and eventually, torture. When you have to

do something for a long, long time, it’s best if it’s  supremely comfortable.

When it comes to marriage, a perpetual “discomfort” between you and your partner can be

a permanent source of unhappiness, especially as it magnifies over time, much like your

torturous situation in the chair. Feeling “at home” means feeling safe, cozy, natural, and

utterly yourself, and in order to have this feeling with a partner, a few things need to be in

place:

  Trust and security. Secrets are poison to a relationship, because they form an invisible wall

inside the relationship, leaving both people somewhat alone in the world — and besides, who

wants to spend 50 years lying or worrying about hiding something? And on the other side of

secrets will often be suspicion, a concept that directly clashes with the concept of home. This

is why having an affair during an otherwise good marriage is one of the most self-defeatingand short-sighted things someone could ever do.

  Natural chemistry. Interacting should be easy and natural, energy levels should be in the

same vicinity, and you should feel on the same ―wavelength‖ in general. When I‘m with

someone on a very different wavelength than I am, it doesn‘t take long before the interaction

 becomes exhausting.

  Acceptance of human flaws. You‘re flawed. Like, really flawed. And so is your current or

future life-partner. Being flawed is part of the definition of being a human. And one of the

worst fates would be to spend most of your life being criticized for your flaws and

reprimanded for continuing to have them. This isn‘t to say people shouldn‘t work on self -

improvement, but when it comes to a life partnership, the healthy attitude is, ―Every person

comes with a set of flaws, these are my partner‘s, and they‘re part of the package I knowingly

chose to spend my life with.‖ 

  A generally positive vibe. Remember, this is the vibe you‘re a part of now, forever. It‘s not

really acceptable for it to be a negative one, nor is it sustainable. Relationship scientist John

Gottman has found that ―couples with a ratio of fewer than five positive interactions for every

negative one are destined for divorce.‖7 

3) A Determination to be Good at Marriage 

Relationships are hard. Expecting a strong relationship without treating it like a rigorous

part-time job is like expecting to have a great career without putting in any effort. In a time

when humans in most parts of the world can enjoy freedom and carve their own path in

life, it usually doesn’t sit that well to suddenly become half of something and compromise

on a bunch of things you grew up being selfish about.

So what skills does someone need to learn to be good at marriage?

  Communication. Communication being on this list is as silly as ―oxygen‖ being on a list of

items you need to stay healthy. And yet, poor communication is the downfall of a huge

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number of couples — in fact, in a study on divorcees, communication style was the top thing

they said they‘d change for their next relationship.8 Communication is hard to do well

consistently — successful couples often need to create pre-planned systems or even partake in

couples‘ therapy to make sure it happens. 

  Maintaining equality. Relationships can slip into an unequal power dynamic pretty quickly.

When one person‘s mood always dictates the mood in the room, when one person‘s needs or

opinion consistently prevail over the other‘s, when one person can treat the other in a way

they‘d never stand for being treated themselves —you‘ve got a problem. 

  Fighting well. Fighting is inevitable. But there are good and bad ways to fight. When a

couple is good at fighting, they defuse tension, approach things with humor, and genuinely

listen to the other side, while avoiding getting nasty, personal or defensive. They also fight

less often than a bad couple. According to John Gottman, 69% of a typical couple‘s fights are

 perpetual, based on core differences, and cannot be resolved — and a skilled couple

understands this and refrains from engaging in these brawls again and again. 9 

In searching for your life partner or assessing your current life partnership, it’s important to

remember that every relationship is flawed and you probably won’t end up in something

that gets an A in every one of the above items and bullet points—but you should hope to

do pretty well on most  of them, since each one plays a large part in your lifelong happiness.

And since this is a daunting list to try to achieve in a life partnership, you probably don’t

want to make things even harder than they need to be by insisting upon too many other

checkboxes—most of which will not have a large effect on your happiness during dinner

#4,386 of your marriage. It would be nice if he played the guitar, but take it off the list ofmust-haves.

Finally, I’ll wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day—I hope you enjoy yourself, whatever you’re

doing for it. But just remember that Forgettable Wednesday is a much more important day.

 __________

Sources 

The facts and opinions in this article are based on a combination of dozens of hours of

research, on both scientific study results and expert opinions, and of my own personalexperience and observations and those of a number of my friends and family (many of

whom I interviewed in the last week). Special thanks to Eric Barker for his great

blog, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, from which I mined a number of sources for this post.