How To Pick a Life Partner

To a frustrated single person, life can often feel like this:

Staircase  1

And at first glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are (on an average) happier than single people and much happier than divorced people. But a closer analysis reveals that if you split up married people into two groups based on marriage quality, people in self- assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less happy than unmarried people, and people in self- assessed good marriages are even more happy than the literature reports. In other words, here’s what’s happening in reality:

Staircase 2

Dissatisfied single people should actually consider themselves in a neutral, fairly hopeful position, compared to what their situation could be. A single person who would like to find a great relationship is one step away from it, with their to-do list reading:

Find a great relationship.
People in unhappy relationships, on the other hand, are three leaps away, with a to-do list of ‘1) Go through a soul-crushing breakup; 2) Recover emotionally; 3) Find a great relationship.’ Not as bad when you look at it that way, right?

Its a huge deal.
The research on how vastly happiness varies between happy and unhappy marriages makes perfect sense. It’s your life partner. Start by subtracting your age from 90. If you live a long life, that’s about the numbers of years you’re going to spend with your current or future life partner, give or take a few. 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 holidays, your primary leisure-time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you will hear about more than 18,000 times.

Intense!
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? As it turns out, there are a bunch of factors working against us.

Society has it all wrong—and gives us terrible advice
Society encourages us to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide. But 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 analyse your business performance diligently. This is logical—because that’s the way you proceed when you want to do something well and minimize mistakes.

Yet, 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 kept their progress organised 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, and instead opts for things such as 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 preference or our current opportunities, opportunities win hands down. Our dating choices are 98 percent a response to market conditions and just two 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. In other words, people end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might seem to be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that 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.

Our biology is doing us no favours
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. This means that when the right move is to move on and find something better, we often succumb to a chemical roller coaster and end up getting engaged. Plus, biological clocks are a b*tch. A woman who wants to have biological children with her husband needs to pick the right life partner by 40, give or take. This is just a sh*tty fact that makes an already hard process one notch more stressful. (Still, isn’t it better to adopt children with the right life partner than have biological children with the wrong one?). This all combines into a frenzy of big decisions for bad reasons, and a lot of people messing up this most important decision of their life.

Luckless love types
Recognise yourself or a potential life partner among the below types, who commonly fall victim to all of this and end up in unhappy relationships? A sign you need a serious rethink.

Overly romantic Rhea
Her downfall is believing that love is enough reason to marry someone. Romance can be a great part of a relationship, and love is a key ingredient in a happy marriage, but without other important things, it’s simply not enough. Yet once an overly romantic person believes they’ve found their soulmate, they stop questioning things and will hang on to that belief through 50 years of an unhappy marriage.

Fear-driven Farah
One of the worst possible decision-makers when it comes to picking a life partner is fear. Unfortunately, the way society is set up, fear starts infecting otherwise rational people. The irony is that the only rational fear we should feel is the fear of spending the latter two thirds of life unhappily, with the wrong person—the exact fate fear-driven people risk because they’re trying to be risk-averse.

Externally influenced Esha
Externally influenced Esha lets other people play way too big a part in her life-partner decision. Choosing a life partner is personal, enormously complicated, different for everyone and almost impossible to understand from the outside, no matter how well you know someone. The saddest example of this is someone breaking up with a person who would have been the right life partner because of external disapproval. It can also happen the opposite way, where everyone in someone’s life is thrilled with a relationship because it looks great from the outside, even though it’s not that great from the inside.

Shallow Sanya
She’s the kind of girl who is more concerned with the on-paper description of her life partner than his inner personality. There are a bunch of boxes that she needs to have ticked—things such as his height, job prestige, wealth level, accomplishments, or perhaps a novelty item, such as a foreign passport or a specific talent.

Selfish sorts
The selfish types come in three (sometimes overlapping) varieties:

Cheap date idea 
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 partner or, at worst, a pushover with self-esteem issues. She sacrifices a chance to be a part of a team of equals, which will almost certainly limit the potential quality of her marriage.

The main character
Her tragic flaw is being massively self-absorbed. The main character wants a life partner who serves as both a therapist and an admirer, but is mostly uninterested in returning either favour. Each night, she and her partner discuss the day, but 90 percent of the discussion centres around her day—after all, she is the main character in the relationship. The issue is that by being incapable of tearing herself away from her personal world, she ends up with a sidekick as a life partner, which makes for a pretty boring 50 years.

The needs-driven
Everyone has needs and everyone likes those needs to be met—but problems arise when the meeting of needs becomes the main grounds for choosing someone as a life partner. Those are just perks. After a year of marriage, when the needs-driven person is completely accustomed to having her needs met and it’s no longer exciting, there better be many 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.