How to Focus on What Matters in a Long-Term Partner
Brian looked like Keanu Reeves’s more attractive brother.
We met at Burning Man, the annual art and psychedelics festival in the Nevada desert. That first night, dressed head to toe in white linen, dust goggles draped around his neck, he whispered, “Can I kiss you?” I nodded, adjusting the cream-colored fur hat I’d paired with a spotted onesie to complete my snow leopard look. We kissed as Paul Oakenfold DJed. Thousands of Burners danced around us. When the beat dropped, the crowd cheered, and we kissed harder.
Later, a stranger in a wizard’s robe handed us a Polaroid capturing our embrace. “You just looked so in love.” And I was sure we were. I was swept up in the romance of falling for him while exploring this otherworldly desert moonscape.
I was still interested in Brian when we returned to San Francisco. One afternoon we sat on a bench at Google headquarters, where we both worked, and traded stories about our “decompression”—the experience of adjusting back to real life after Burning Man. Brian had swapped his linen for jeans and a T-shirt.
We swiped some beers from a microkitchen and hopped on the Google shuttle back to San Francisco. I grinned as I slid onto the seat next to him. We shared headphones. Left earbud in his ear, right earbud in mine, he played “The Trapeze Swinger” by Iron and Wine. I closed my eyes and remembered our deliriously happy moment dancing in the desert. This is what love feels like, I thought.
Brian was hot, spontaneous, and fun. But also unreliable. I never knew if he’d text me back or come over when he said he would. He knew how much I liked him. He’d act interested one day and aloof the next. I never asked myself questions like this: Is he kind and thoughtful? Do I trust his judgment? Would he remember to take our kids to the dentist? (If his own dentist-going habits were any indication, no, he would not.)
Looking back, I wonder why I, someone who wanted to find a serious partner and create a long-term relationship, desperately tried to convince him to date me. Why did I keep falling for guys like Brian? My choices weren’t helping me create the relationship I wanted. Instead of dating for long-term partnership, I was optimizing for short-term fun.
Many of us struggle to make good choices for our future selves—and not just when it comes to dating. We’re guilty of this when we procrastinate on household chores (although we know we have to do them eventually), when we don’t exercise (although we know it’s important for long-term health), and when we spend money frivolously (although we know we should save it). These are all moments when we fall prey to the present bias, an error in judgment that causes us to place a disproportionately high value on the here and now and an inappropriately low value on the future.
Many of us don’t date for long-term viability. I certainly didn’t when chasing Brian. I call this pursuing the Prom Date. What’s an ideal prom date? Someone who looks great in pictures, gives you a night full of fun, and makes you look cool in front of your friends. Many of us finished high school more than a decade ago, and yet we’re still using the same rubric to evaluate potential partners. Do you really want to marry the Prom Date? To worry if your partner is going to help you take care of your aging parents? Or show up to your kid’s parent-teacher conference? Or nurse you back to health after contracting a case of Montezuma’s revenge?
Those probably aren’t the questions you ask yourself when you first meet someone. The answers have little bearing on whether you want to kiss the person or go out with them again. (And who wants to think about diarrhea on a first date!?) But when you’re looking for a long-term partner, you want someone who will be there for you during the highs and the lows. Someone you can rely on. Someone to make decisions with. The Life Partner.
I’m lucky to count the brilliant couples therapist Esther Perel as a mentor. She once explained to me the difference between a love story and a life story. There are many people with whom you can share a tryst but far fewer with whom you can build a life. When you’re thinking about who to marry, she says, don’t ask yourself: What would a love story with this person look like? Instead, ask: Can I make a life with this person? That’s the fundamental distinction.
Most of us start developing crushes on the Prom Date around the time we go through puberty. And it makes sense! When you’re a teen, you’re thinking about whom you want to smooch, not who will make a good coparent.
But you’re not fifteen anymore. If you really are seeking a long-term relationship with a committed partner, you need to stop looking for a Prom Date and start seeking a Life Partner.
When should you make this shift? There isn’t one answer for everyone, but in a conversation I had with behavioral economist Dan Ariely, we came up with a helpful rule of thumb for those of you who want to have children: You should deliberately change the way you evaluate potential partners around six to eight years before you want to have kids. Now, that’s not a scientific number but, rather, a framework for thinking through when to make this shift.
I imagine many of you—like many of my clients—are already in that critical window. I don’t mean to make you feel behind. I just want to encourage you to take yourself seriously and start dating someone who has the potential to be a serious partner.
Be honest with yourself. Do you tend to date Prom Dates or Life Partners? A client once told me she’d gone on several dates with a guy who lived alone. When she visited his apartment and used the bathroom, she was met with a sink full of beard hair trimmings, an overflowing trash can, and no toilet paper. This woman is a successful, talented professional. She’s thirty-four, and she told me she wants to have “many kids.” I’m not saying that a guy with a filthy bathroom couldn’t make a great husband and father. But if she’s thirty-four and wants to give birth to a brood of children, she realistically needs to start soon. And who’s more likely to be ready to start a family—a guy with a clean bathroom or a man who still acts like he lives in a dorm? I advised her to say goodbye to this Prom Date and focus her energy on finding a Life Partner.
To shift toward pursuing the Life Partner, you must learn to recognize the present bias and deliberately work against it.
In addition to coaching, I also work as a matchmaker and set my clients up on dates. I started this work when I learned how many of my friends and clients were struggling on the apps. As a matchmaker, I’ve met with dozens of people to learn what they’re looking for in a partner. Hundreds have filled out the matchmaking form on my website to join “Logan’s List.” Through this process, I’ve collected enough data to understand what people think matters most in a serious partner. We can compare that to what the academic field of relationship science tells us actually matters for long-term relationship success.
We can thank John Gottman for many of these relationship science insights. He spent more than four decades studying romantic relationships. For years, he and his colleague Robert Levenson brought couples into an observational research laboratory dubbed the “Love Lab” by the media. There, he recorded them discussing their relationship. He asked couples to share the story of how they met and then recount a recent fight. He even invited couples to spend a weekend in an apartment he’d decked out with cameras to observe how they interacted during everyday moments.
Years after they participated in the apartment study, Gottman followed up with the couples to check on their relationships. They fell into two camps: the “masters,” couples who were still happily married; and the “disasters,” couples who had either broken up or remained together unhappily. He studied the original tapes of these two types of couples to learn what patterns separated the masters from the disasters.
When we look at Gottman’s findings, and the work of other relationship scientists, we can see clearly which qualities contribute to long-term relationship success. In other words, the research tells us what makes a good Life Partner. However, these are not the traits my matchmaking clients tend to ask for. Instead, they focus on short-term desirability—or the characteristics of a good Prom Date.
Not only do we undervalue the qualities that matter for long-term relationships, we overvalue irrelevant ones. In part, we can blame a cognitive error called the focusing illusion—our tendency to overestimate the importance of certain factors when anticipating outcomes, like our future happiness.
Behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade explored this phenomenon. They asked people attending college in Michigan and Ohio who they thought were happier—Midwestern students, like themselves, or students in California. They asked students in Southern California the same questions.
Both groups predicted that the California students were happier. Yet researchers found the overall life satisfaction for Californian and Midwestern students was nearly identical.
It turned out that both sets of students overestimated the impact that living in a warmer climate has on daily satisfaction. That’s because the climate is an “easily observable and distinctive” difference between these two places. They ignored all the other factors that contribute to happiness, which both sets of students shared: concerns about grades, social status, family issues, money, career prospects, and more. Those things are the same no matter the weather. However, when asked to compare life in those two places, the students focused on the weather and assumed it had a greater impact than it really does.
Kahneman summarized this research finding perfectly: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” Merely thinking about something accentuates the differences.
We’re guilty of falling victim to the focusing illusion when selecting potential mates. The people I coach often list requirements such as “I need someone who loves to dance.” In that moment, they’re focusing on the fact that they themselves love to dance. Then, because of the focusing illusion, just thinking about it causes them to overestimate its importance. The truth is, even if they’re notorious for sweating through their shirt on salsa night, they likely don’t spend more than a few hours a month on the dance floor. But people tend to fixate on these insignificant characteristics and ignore the far more important factors that are correlated with long-term relationship happiness (more on those in a moment).
The same is true of looks, money, and more. These things make a difference, just much less than we tend to think.
Don’t get me wrong, money matters. When couples below the poverty line struggle to meet their basic needs, their marriage suffers. Texas Tech University psychologists studied married couples in therapy and found that low-income couples were far more dissatisfied with their relationship than middle-income couples. In fact, low-income couples felt about as unhappy as divorced couples did in the month before they broke up.
It’s no secret that financial woes cause marital stress. It’s one of the main reasons why couples divorce. If you have enough resources, you won’t constantly face the strain of hard financial decisions, like having to choose between getting your oldest child braces and sending your youngest to a math tutor. What’s more, research from Harvard Business School found that couples who can afford to outsource time-intensive tasks like cooking and cleaning enjoy greater relationship satisfaction because they can spend more quality time together.
But that doesn’t mean that in order to be happy, you should pursue the richest partner you can. While it’s difficult to determine an exact threshold beyond which more money will no longer buy you more happiness, research by behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton famously found that there is no increase in “emotional well-being” (economist-speak for happiness) once salaries exceed $75,000 a year.
In fact, additional research suggests that the extent to which you can derive happiness from money in the first place depends on the wealth of those around you. In other words, it’s not really the size of your house that matters. It’s the size of your house in comparison to the size of your neighbors’ houses.
That’s because we acclimate to our conditions. We often forget about adaptation—the process of getting used to a situation. No matter how wonderful something is, the novelty eventually wears off, and we stop paying much attention to it. And once we stop paying attention to it, it doesn’t bring us the same level of joy, or misery, that it did when we were focused on it. This explains the results of a 1978 study led by psychologist Philip Brickman, in which he and his team surveyed lottery winners a year after their windfall. Lottery winners, it turns out, are less happy in the long term than you’d think. They’re about as happy as non–lottery winners, and actually have an even harder time enjoying the small pleasures in life than people who haven’t won anything. Lottery winners adapted to their environment, and their wealth had a much smaller than anticipated effect on their overall life satisfaction.
Key tip for your dating search
When we make a decision, we tend to focus on the immediate joy or misery it will bring. But remember: We are bad fortune-tellers! We often can’t account for how those feelings will change over time. Money matters, but only up to a certain extent. You’re not wrong for considering that element of your future relationship, but don’t prioritize wealth above all else.
It’s no secret that looks make a difference in many realms of life. Attractive people tend to earn higher salaries and beat their less attractive opponents in political races. In multiple studies investigating attractiveness, researchers noted that good-looking people are perceived as more persuasive, trustworthy, outgoing, socially competent and powerful, sexually responsive, healthy, intelligent, and likable.
And when it comes to dating, there’s a historical and evolutionary reason for prizing good looks. Early on, life was a constant struggle for survival. Physically attractive traits—like clear skin or thick hair—indicated health and vitality. That was important for mate selection because it meant that not only would this person pass on these desirable quality traits to your kids, they’d also be more likely to stay alive long enough to help raise them. No wonder our brains trained us to go for the hotties.
In today’s world, thanks to the miracle of modern medicine and industrialized food production, we’re not plagued by the same issues. Our offspring have a very good chance at surviving, so it no longer makes sense to prioritize reproductive fitness—the ability to pass on genes to future generations—when choosing a partner. Your kid will be fine even if his dad had acne in his teens.
What’s more, focusing on attractiveness to the exclusion of other traits ignores the fact that lust inevitably fades over time (and remember, we’re going for long-term success here). In his book The Science of Happily Ever After, psychologist Ty Tashiro analyzed a fourteen-year longitudinal study of satisfaction in marriages over time. He found that over the course of seven years, “lust” (sexual desire) for a partner declined twice as fast as “liking” (friendship characterized by loyalty and kindness).
Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher helps explain why that happens. Lust is incredibly intense in the beginning and then fades. When we fall in love, it feels like we’re addicted to the other person, as if they’re a drug. Fisher found that cocaine and falling in love light up the same regions of the brain.
The fading of our lust is also a strategic evolutionary move. Our “addiction” to our partner keeps us around long enough to have a baby and raise him or her together until the child is around four years old, old enough to be somewhat independent (at least on the ancient savanna) and survive. Once our work there is done, lust fades, and our brain frees us to create new children with new partners, increasing the chance that at least one of our children will live to adulthood and carry on our DNA.
If you’re judging your relationship during a stage when you have sex all the time, how well can you predict what the relationship will be like when that slows down?
And if it’s good sex you’re after, there’s no guarantee someone who is attractive will even be good in bed. There may be skills that beautiful people never develop because they don’t need to. An episode of the TV show 30 Rock called “The Bubble” takes this idea to the extreme. Jon Hamm plays a character who is insulated by his own handsomeness. He’s a former tennis pro who can’t serve, a doctor who doesn’t know the Heimlich maneuver, and as Tina Fey’s character complains, “He’s as bad at sex as I am.” Her suave boss knows this phenomenon firsthand: “That is the danger of being super-handsome,” he tells her. “When you’re in the bubble, nobody ever tells you the truth.” So yeah, don’t assume that the best-looking people make the best lovers.
Finally, remember what we just learned about adaptation. Even if you marry the most attractive person, eventually, you’ll get used to how they look. That initial pleasure will fade. A big part of our sex drive is associated with novelty. So no matter how hot your partner is, it’s likely that your sexual interest in them will decrease over time, simply because they are no longer new to you. To paraphrase some Internet wisdom: “For every hot person, there is someone out there tired of having sex with them.”
Infatuation fades! Lust fades! All that matters is that you feel attracted to the person, not that you scored the hottest possible person.
Key tip for your dating search
Physical attraction can obscure long-term compatibility. Pay attention to whether or not you’re attracted to someone and focus less on how society would evaluate that person’s looks. Don’t prioritize lust over more important long-term factors.
My clients often complain that they need to find a partner with a personality similar to theirs. I hear: “I’m so extroverted and he’s so introverted. It would never work.” Or: “I’m really neurotic and nothing ever seems to bother him. We’re just not a match.”
I’ve found this sentiment especially common among my older clients. When we’re younger and we enter a relationship, it’s like a start-up—two people coming together to build something. We’re more flexible and still figuring out what we want. When we’re older and thinking about long-term relationships and, eventually, marriage, the process is more like a merger: two complete beings coming together. The older we get, the more set in our ways we are, and the more we crave someone who will easily fit into our lives. We assume that the more similar we are, the easier the merger will be.
But that assumption is wrong. Research tells us that similar personalities are not a predictor of long-term relationship success. In my interview with Northwestern professor and marriage expert Eli Finkel, he said, “There is no correlation between how satisfied or how happy you are with a relationship and how similar your personalities are.” In other words, we make our potential pool of partners smaller by mistakenly eliminating people who are not similar enough to us.
The question is: Would you really want to date yourself? I know I wouldn’t!
A client of mine is the life of the party. He’s an event promoter with a big personality. He was dating someone calm and caring who liked to be in bed before ten p.m. on most nights. He wondered, Wouldn’t my life be better if I dated someone more like me?
I sat him down and told him that two of him would be too much for one room, let alone one relationship! They’d fight to be the center of attention. “Do you know the show The Amazing Race?” I asked him. The show follows couples or pairs of friends or family members who travel to exotic locations to complete missions. “The pairs that are too similar fight,” I said. “They get stuck on the same things. The most successful duos complement each other. They don’t have identical traits. When they miss a flight, one partner finds another route and soothes the other’s panic. That’s what makes them win. You want the same thing with your life partner.”
Over the course of a year, he worked on appreciating his partner’s differences rather than wishing she were more like him. They recently decided to have a baby together.
Key tip for your dating search
Find someone who complements you, not your personality twin.
GENETICS!
Many people say they want to find someone with a similar personality. Yet when Michigan State University researchers William Chopik and Richard Lucas studied more than twenty-five hundred married couples who had been together for an average of twenty years, they found that couples with similar personalities aren’t any more satisfied with their relationships.
And when it comes to our genes, we may have evolved to prefer people who are genetically dissimilar to us. There’s a theory that we feel attracted to the smell of people who are genetically different from us because if we reproduced with them, we’d pass on two very different sets of genes—making our offspring more robust and more likely to survive.
Swiss biological researcher Claus Wedekind explored this in his famous T-shirt study. He collected DNA samples from male and female students. To capture their smell, he instructed male students to wear the same cotton T-shirt for two nights and to avoid smell-producing activities like sex. Then he asked female students to smell six T-shirts—three from genetically similar men and three from genetically dissimilar ones—and rate each one based on intensity, pleasantness, and sexiness. He found women preferred the smell of the men whose genes were more dissimilar from theirs. (Coincidentally, the effect reverses for women on oral birth control. Things can get awkward when a couple marries, the woman goes off birth control, and suddenly, she’s attracted to different people.)
Once, when I was on a road trip with an old friend, we started talking about how she and her husband love tennis. That conversation carried us all the way to the gas station. She got out of the car and browsed her phone while filling up the tank. When she climbed back in, she thrust her phone in my face and said, “Look. Aren’t my in-laws cute?” Her screen showed a blurry, poorly executed selfie of a couple in their sixties.
As she started the car, she said, “Honestly, it’s surprising my husband’s parents have been married for so long. They have nothing in common.”
“People often think shared hobbies matter more than they do,” I responded. “It’s possible you’re underestimating all the things they do share.” By then she had already heard me talk about the Gottmans. (Along with obscure Weird Al trivia, I usually mention the Gottmans before the first pit stop on a road trip.)
John Gottman, whom I mentioned earlier, is married to Julie Gottman, a noted clinical psychologist. John chose to spend many years of his life in a lab, coding the micro-expressions of couples. Unsurprisingly, he considers himself “an avid indoorsman.” He jokes that he’s the kind of person who can think of a thousand ways to die at a picnic. Julie shares his passion for helping couples. But Julie’s idea of fun is spending time in the wilderness. She was a competitive skier in college. For her fiftieth birthday, she dreamed of hiking to Everest Base Camp. Imagine John, the guy afraid of picnics, ice-picking his way up Mount Everest with Julie.
Of course, John and Julie knew about these differences before they got married. Yet, because of their work, they also understood that couples do not need to share hobbies to create a successful long-term relationship. And they’ve been happily married for more than thirty years.
Here’s the key: It’s fine to have different interests, so long as the time you spend pursuing your favorite activities doesn’t preclude you from investing in the relationship. If you love wine and your partner couldn’t care less about it, that’s okay; you don’t need to marry a sommelier. What matters is that when you drink wine, or go on a trip to Napa to try a new prized cabernet sauvignon, your partner doesn’t try to make you feel guilty or say something like “Why do you always have to drink?” A good relationship has space for different people with different hobbies.
Key tip for your dating search
Don’t worry about finding someone with the same hobbies. It’s fine to enjoy different activities as long as you give each other the space and freedom to explore those hobbies on your own.
THE OTHER SIGNIFICANT OTHER (OSO)
One technique for managing different hobbies is the “other significant other” (OSO), a phrase coined by relationship scientist Eli Finkel. Modern couples often assume they can get all of their needs met by their romantic partner. They expect this one person to wear many hats—in fact, almost all of the hats; hats that had been dispersed among our social network before we were married.
Expecting our partners to fulfill all our needs puts a lot of pressure on relationships. OSOs help alleviate that pressure. Think of it this way: If you try to pile dozens of hats on one person’s head, the pile (and maybe the person) will topple over. Instead, you can give the baseball cap to your sports-loving cousin and call her when you want to talk RBIs. You can give the cowboy hat to your friend who loves country music and make plans with him the next time you want a two-stepping partner.
Research from social psychologists Elaine Cheung, Wendi Gardner, and Jason Anderson supports this idea. They found that having multiple people you can turn to for emotional needs—rather than just one or two—leads to an increase in your overall well-being. For example, you might talk to your roommate when you’re angry and depend on your sister when you’re sad.
When you’re in a relationship, here’s how you can incorporate OSOs into your life. Consider what roles you’ve asked your partner to play that they are uninterested in fulfilling: for example, insisting they go to a party with you when they much prefer smaller gatherings. Or wishing your partner would suggest visits to museums and art galleries when it’s just not their thing. Remember, just because they don’t share all your interests doesn’t make them a bad partner! And for those roles your partner isn’t suited for, find a friend or family member who can fill in. In the long run, this will make you happier because your needs are being met. And it will make your partner happier because they can focus on roles that match their skills and interests.
When I work with clients, I rarely hear them say their number one goal is to find someone who’s emotionally stable. Or good at making hard decisions. Sometimes they’ll mention kindness, but usually after telling me their height minimum and maximum. And yet these are all examples of qualities that relationship scientists have found contribute much more to long-term relationship success than superficial traits or shared interests.
It’s not that people don’t know that this stuff matters; rather, they just tend to underestimate the value of these attributes when deciding whom to date. (One reason is that these qualities can be hard to measure. They may be discernible only after spending time with someone. This also explains why dating apps focus on the easier-to-measure, matter-less-than-you-think traits, but more on that in the next chapter.) If you want to find a Life Partner, look for someone with the following traits:
In his book The Science of Happily Ever After, psychologist Ty Tashiro digs into the existing research on what matters when choosing a partner. He found that emotional stability and kindness are two of the most important and yet underrated characteristics. He defines emotional stability as being able to self-regulate and not give in to anger or impulsivity. The combined emotional stability of a couple predicts the satisfaction and stability of their relationship.
In his 2017 TED Talk, Tashiro notes that “Kind partners are awesome. They’re generous, they’re empathic, and they want to be supportive of you.” Kindness and emotional stability also allow us to treat our partner with care and compassion, which research from John and Julie Gottman suggests is the key to long-term relationship success.
Key tip for your dating search
You can get a sense of how kind someone is by paying attention to how they treat people from whom they don’t need anything. Are they nice to the waiter? Do they give up their seat on the subway? Are they patient with new team members who are learning the ropes at work? Do they treat their friends and parents with compassion?
One way to get a sense of someone’s emotional stability is to pay attention to how they respond to stressful situations. Do they freak out or keep their cool? Emotionally stable partners are measured in their responses. They take time to thoughtfully respond rather than impulsively react. When I explain this concept to my clients, I quote Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and celebrated psychiatrist. He wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Someone who is emotionally stable takes advantage of that space.
You know those fair-weather friends who are with you when life is going great but forget your number when you need help? A fair-weather friend may be fine in certain situations, but you don’t want a fair-weather partner. Find someone who will be there for the good and the bad. Loyalty matters.
I often think about a passage my sister read in a speech at her wedding. (I also often think about how she rejected my multiple bids to officiate—who wouldn’t want a modern-day yenta with them under the chuppah?) It’s from an article by Robin Schoenthaler, a doctor who treats cancer patients, called “Will He Hold Your Purse?”
Schoenthaler explains that she’s observed thousands of couples going through a crisis, which has taught her what really matters in a relationship: “It’s a privilege to witness these couples, but the downside is I find myself muttering under my breath when my single female friends show me their ads for online dating. ‘Must like long walks on beach at sunset, cats,’ they write, or ‘French food, kayaking, travel.’ Or a perennial favorite: ‘Looking for fishing buddy; must be good with bait.’ These ads make me want to climb onto my cancer doctor soapbox and proclaim, ‘Finding friends with fine fishing poles may be great in the short term. But what you really want to look for is somebody who will hold your purse in the cancer clinic.’ ”
My sister found a wonderful man who will hold her purse whenever she needs him to. In other words, she married someone who shows up for her, who takes care of her when she’s down. Look for loyalty. Look for someone who’s there for you whether you’ve won an industry award or are stuck in the cancer ward.
Key tip for your dating search
One easy way to estimate someone’s loyalty is to see if they have friends from different stages of their lives. How many old friendships have they carried with them over the years? Did they ditch their college bestie when they got depressed, or do they still meet up for monthly movie matinees? Do people from their past seem to rely on them for companionship and support? Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, since some people have moved around a lot or lived in places where they didn’t fit in. But in general, old friendships indicate loyalty.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has spent decades studying what she calls “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. People with a growth mindset believe that they can improve their intelligence and skills. They love to learn. They’re motivated by challenges and see failure as a sign that they need to stretch their abilities. They’re resilient and comfortable taking risks. Someone with a fixed mindset believes the opposite: that talent and intelligence are assigned at birth and taking a risk only presents an opportunity to embarrass yourself.
You want to align yourself with someone who has a growth mindset because when problems arise, which they inevitably will, you’ll want a partner who will rise to the occasion, not throw up their hands in defeat. A person with a growth mindset is much more likely to buckle down and work on improving things rather than give up on the relationship and assume things can’t be fixed.
Key tip for your dating search
You can spot people with a growth mindset by paying attention to how they handle themselves in different situations.
Situation |
Fixed |
Growth |
|---|---|---|
How they approach challenges |
Avoid them |
Embrace them |
How they respond to setbacks |
Give up |
Persist |
How they view learning new skills |
As a chance to embarrass themselves |
As a chance to grow |
How they respond to someone else’s accomplishments |
Feel threatened |
Feel inspired |
How they speak to themselves |
With condemnation from a loud inner critic |
With self-compassion |
In the end, a relationship is not about who each of you is separately, it’s about what happens when the two of you come together. What does this person bring out in you? Does their kindness make you feel relaxed and cared for? Or does their anxiety provoke your anxiety? You must understand what qualities they bring out in you, because this is who you’ll be whenever you’re with them.
A client met a guy who seemed perfect on paper. He had everything she thought she was looking for, especially in terms of intelligence and career success. Unfortunately, whenever they were together, he made her feel small. He’d ask her why she chose a certain recipe that was clearly above her cooking skill level. Or he’d make fun of the framed Picasso posters that hung on her wall. She’d leave dates with him questioning her decisions—and herself. At first, she thought his criticisms made her stronger. She tried to convince me he was merely trying to “up her game.” But through our work together, she realized that he was actually very insecure and that his insecurity triggered her own insecurity. It didn’t matter what he looked like on paper. In person, he made her feel bad about herself. She refused to choose a lifetime of self-doubt and ended things with him.
One of my friends says his girlfriend makes him feel competent. She asks for his advice—and takes it. She relies on him in a way that makes him feel important and capable. He loves the side of him that she brings out.
Key tip for your dating search
Pay attention to how you feel when you’re around this person or right after you finish spending time together. Energized? Deflated? Bored? Challenged? Happy? Desired? Smart? Stupid? Select someone who brings out the best side of you.
It could also be helpful to get a third-party view by going out with a group of friends. Instead of asking, “What did you think of him?” ask, “What did you think of me around him?”
Fights aren’t fun, but they don’t necessarily spell disaster. If you lacked relationship role models who demonstrated how to fight and how to make up, don’t fret. You can learn to fight well.
Fights—anything from a small disagreement to a screaming match—are a chance to deal with things as they come up instead of letting resentment build. A friend of mine prided himself on not fighting with his girlfriend. She had decorated their house, and he felt like there was no room for him. His interests and his stuff were not represented. He wanted to bring it up, but because he believed that avoiding conflict was a sign of a healthy relationship, he didn’t. He grew more and more resentful of her over time. The lack of physical representation in their shared space started to seem like a metaphor for their whole relationship—he didn’t see himself in it. He stopped investing in their partnership and began to spend most of his time at work, where he had his own office. By the time he finally broached the issue, it was too late. Too much space and resentment had grown between them, and they decided to end their five-year relationship.
The first step in fighting well is understanding that there are two types of problems in relationships: solvable problems and perpetual ones—unsolvable, permanent features of your partnership. John Gottman discovered that 69 percent of all relationship conflicts are perpetual.
Common examples of perpetual problems include situations where one person likes to go out while the other prefers to stay in, or where one person is neat and the other is messy. These might include differing opinions on work, family, ambition, money, and sexual frequency.
Imagine that you’re someone who arrives five (okay, ten) minutes late to everything, and your significant other grew up in a family with the slogan “Early is on time, on time is late, and late means don’t bother showing up.” You’ll inevitably fight over punctuality. You may find solutions to manage this difference, like going to the airport separately, but it’s unlikely that you’ll solve the problem. The goal is not to convince each other to change or even to come to an agreement—it’s to find a productive way to live with this difference.
As the late couples therapist Dan Wile explained in his book After the Honeymoon: “When choosing a long-term partner, you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unresolvable problems.” The goal isn’t to find someone with whom you don’t fight. It’s to choose a partner with whom you fight well, and who doesn’t make you worry that the fight will end the relationship. The second element to fighting well is being able to recover from a disagreement. John Gottman writes about “repair attempts,” statements or actions that prevent a fight from escalating. Successful couples are able to break the intensity of a fight by making a joke, conceding a point, or telling their partner what they appreciate about them.
Key tip for your dating search
Remember that you’ll inevitably have disagreements with whomever you choose. Pay attention to how you fight. Are you able to get your point across? Do you feel heard? Does your partner make repair attempts to de-escalate the disagreement? The goal is to fight well, not to avoid fights altogether.
You and your partner will, at some point, face tough choices. What do you do if one of you gets an unbelievable job offer in another city? Or if you need to raise a child with a disability? How will you handle aging parents who need around-the-clock care? You want to be with someone who can make hard decisions with you.
One of my clients dated someone who lost her job the first month they were dating: She had to simultaneously mourn the loss of her dream job and look for new work. If she couldn’t find something good quickly, she had to decide if she wanted to stay in San Francisco or move back east. While this was challenging, my client said that helping her through these tough choices revealed how well they functioned together in a challenging situation. It certainly wasn’t fun, but it demonstrated their compatibility and strengthened their relationship.
Key tip for your dating search
The best way to know what it will be like to make decisions with someone is to actually make decisions together. Real decisions (read: not whether to order Chinese or Thai food). It’s critical to stress-test your relationship. I am not recommending that you artificially create a crisis (such as texting: “HELP! Grandma’s been kidnapped!”), but I am recommending you pay attention during shared experiences that challenge both of you. For example, what happens when you try to cook a complicated meal or travel internationally? Or when you’re driving together and your car breaks down in the middle of the road? What do you do when you’re each invited to a different wedding on the same weekend? How do you react when you’re stuck deciding between two equally good (or equally bad) options?
Dan Ariely offers something called “the canoe test.” Share a canoe. Yes, an actual canoe. Can you find a rhythm together? Is one of you comfortable leading and the other following, or do you both want to be in charge at all times? Most important, how much do you blame your partner when things go awry? Pay attention to how you literally navigate choppy water together as a team.
As you’ve seen, the things that matter less than we think for long-term relationship success tend to be superficial traits that are easy to discern when you first meet someone. And the things that matter more usually reveal themselves only when you’re in a relationship or have gone on at least a few dates. That’s why you have to intentionally shift your approach in order to focus on what really matters.
Making that shift is hard. I know because I did it.
A long time ago, on a Saturday night about four months after Burning Man, I texted Brian to see what he was doing that night.
“I’m going to Bootie,” he texted back, referring to a local dance party where DJs dress up as robots or pirates and drag queens vogue onstage. I wanted to join him but he didn’t invite me.
My counteroffer: dinner, on me, beforehand. I figured that if I could remind him how much fun we had dancing in the desert, he’d ask me to join him.
After dinner I talked my way into joining his friends’ pregame. Several drinks deep, I insisted on accompanying them to Bootie.
We stood outside as his friends entered the club. I was freezing, in a short leather skirt with a silk tank top tucked in (I’d chosen this outfit hoping to score an invite, and without considering San Francisco’s notoriously cold summer nights). I shifted my weight back and forth on my wobbling heels.
He put his hands on my bare shoulders and looked me in the eyes. “Please don’t follow me in. I want to go out with my friends and meet girls. You need to go home.”
I cried and pleaded, but thirty minutes later, he walked away to join his friends inside the club.
Where had I gone wrong? No dating advice I’d encountered had covered that moment in your life when you’re on the street, alone, outside of a lame club, eyeliner and snot dripping down your face, pining after someone who sends mixed messages and makes you feel foolish.
This wasn’t my first time pursuing someone like Brian. I knew I was going after the wrong people, but I didn’t know how to fix it. A week later, desperate to feel like I was still moving forward, I hired Nadia, a new age dating coach. (I didn’t yet work in the business of love.)
Nadia and I sat cross-legged on the rug in her office/living room/Zen garden/energy nexus. She helped me understand that I liked Brian because he was fun and exciting to be around but that he wasn’t really what I was looking for in a husband, and I didn’t like the anxious side of me he brought out. In her stern Russian accent, she said, “Your homework is to focus on how you want to feel in your relationship.”
During our next meeting, I shared my response: “I want him to make me feel smart, funny, appreciated, and secure in our relationship.”
Nadia nodded approvingly.
On the long walk home from that session, homework in hand, I felt frustrated. As much as I appreciated Nadia’s help, I was still obsessing over Brian. Even in that moment, I wondered where he was and what (or whom) he was thinking about.
I checked my phone and considered sending him a text. In that moment, a calendar invitation popped up. It was from a guy at work named Scott.
We’d met eight years earlier, when we’d had lunch together in college with some mutual friends. The summer before this one, he’d reintroduced himself at the Google shuttle stop. Shortly after that, I’d invited him to another lunch—this time a Harvard alumni gathering at work. During that meal, I’d announced that I wanted to learn the statistics coding language R. He said he’d just dropped out of a math PhD program and offered to tutor me.
We started meeting weekly at work. He was a natural teacher—kind, patient, funny. “Based on the visualization you produced in R, what can you say about the distribution of eruption times for Old Faithful?” he asked me in one tutoring session.
“It’s bimodal?”
“Yes!” he cheered, high-fiving me.
Unfortunately, he undermined our budding flirtation by mentioning his dislike of exotic travel and the Burning Man crowd. I wrote him off.
But that was before. On that walk home, I realized Scott had many of the qualities that I’d told Nadia I was looking for. And he made me feel smart, funny, appreciated, and secure in our relationship.
When I reevaluated Scott through the new lens of what mattered, I realized those initial surface-level preferences were distractions. I loved how I felt around him, even if he shuddered at the idea of staying up all night and partying in the desert. In the years since, I’ve discovered that Nadia’s advice was not just smart—it was backed by mounds of research.
That fateful Saturday, walking through Dolores Park, looking down at the San Francisco skyline, I replied “yes” to his invitation for lunch.
That lunch turned into a weekly—and then daily—activity. We started calling each other to commiserate after our terrible online dates with strangers. He and his friend recorded a YouTube show—a parody of tech called “Silly Valley”—near my house, and we’d meet up for a few minutes before or after their tapings.
One day, as we said goodbye to each other after yet another lunch, he retrieved a white flower that had escaped a tree and put it into my hair.
“It feels like we’re in a haiku,” he said.
I told him I was free that Friday, and he asked me out. (So, technically, I asked him out.)
Scott was nothing like Brian. He made his interest in me clear. I felt excited to see him and spend time with him. There wasn’t that voice in the back of my head wondering, Does he like me? because I knew he did. He’d send me texts like “I’m excited to spend time with you today”; “I like your brain”; and “I just want to rush into things with you.”
Two weeks after our first official date, I sent him an aggressive text, annoyed about something he’d said. I knew from past relationships that this would launch us into a fight. I would sit on my couch, angrily poking at my phone, heart racing, eyes unblinking, as I rage-typed my disappointment in a volley of short, combative texts. I knew what would happen next: We’d go back and forth until I got so upset that I’d revert to some trusted old protest behaviors, likely ignoring his calls and texts. (Let’s hear it for anxious-attachment styles!)
But we never went down that road. Instead, Scott wrote back, “Let’s chat in person about this one.” It was my first time dating someone so secure. It was a completely new experience. We discussed issues instead of careering headfirst into arguments. (It doesn’t hurt that his mom is a therapist.)
It’s been six years since I invited Scott to that lunch at Google.
We’ve now shared two Burning Mans (he eventually came around to it), a five-day scuba diving trip in Thailand, and an apartment. We’ve killed one basil plant and three succulents.
We’re happy. We say R is our love language.