How To Choose A Life Partner: ‘We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love-true love.’ – Robert Fulghum, True Love.
Our perfect one is not just one person, many people out there could be our perfect one if we are willing to put in the hard work to achieve that goal.
To a frustrated single person looking at a lovely couple, life can always feel like an upward staircase of accomplished dreams and an array of achieved goals all the way up the ladder. It is not always as rosy as couples often like to display it. In every achieved dream, goal, or accomplishment that was done by both of them, there is a series of failures, misunderstandings, financial constraints, and sometimes heartaches.
This is the primary reason why you shouldn’t run towards the first partner that takes notice. You should give yourself a little bit of time and great consideration to pick your candidate from the menu out of the many that approached you. Single people should actually consider themselves in a neutral or fairly hopeful position, compared to what their situation could be.
You need to do a lot of soul searching and realize that you do not have to make a choice immediately. There should be no urgency. Savor some moments to let time feel worth existing. Thinking about how overwhelmingly important it is to pick the right life partner is like thinking about how huge the universe really is or how terrifying death really is—it’s too intense to internalize the reality of it, so we just don’t think about it that hard and remain in slight denial about the magnitude of the situation.
But unlike death and the universe’s size, picking a life partner is fully in your control, so it’s critical to make yourself entirely clear on how big a deal the decision really is and to thoroughly analyze the most important factors in making it. And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things. This includes:
How To Choose A Life Partner Tips & Advices
- Your parenting partner and someone who will deeply and positively influence your children
- Your cooking partner & eating companion
- Your travel companion
- Your retirement friend
- Your career therapist
- Your everyday listening ears
- Your stay-at-home nurse
So given that this is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, intellectual, loving, kind, smart people end up choosing a life partnership that leaves them dissatisfied and unhappy? I think this is because most people tend to be bad at really understanding the depth of what they want in a relationship. A conundrum between what is most important; needs or wants… or both, a choice between our preferences or the current opportunity…
People end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might 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 or speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way.
Our good old society frowns upon that, and people are often still timid to say they met their spouse on a dating site because the right way or the traditional way or the most romantic way would be to bump into each other in a fancy hotel, or the cliché books-fall-off at the library and prince charming picks them up. The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck or randomly 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 because it is not giving a chance for both genders to be free to date from a large pool.
In our world, especially due to societal pressure the major rule is to get married before you’re too old, and ‘too old’ varies from 35 to 45, 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 because 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.
When we start seeing someone and feel the slightest twinge of excitement, we get bombarded into a long-term commitment instead of taking our time to date several people and being selective. Our brains can usually override this process if we’re just not that into someone, but for all those facing and succumbing to the societal pressure that great, loving, loyal men/women are scarce, they fall into the scarcity trap and end up getting engaged.
For a woman who wants to have biological children with her husband, she has one very real limitation in play, which is the need to pick the right life partner by forty, give or take. This is just an unfortunate 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 quickly and immediately because good men or women are hard to find, that they should under-think, under-explore, and hurry up, and combine that with the biological clock that confuses us as we try to figure it out and promises to stop producing children before too long, what do you get?
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 marriage as a whole.
A great lady once said on a show that 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, in retrospect, 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. Marriage or relationships are like having a forgettable Wednesday. Together.
How To Choose A 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 scores an A in every one of your wants, wishes, dreams, or needs; that does not mean that you should rush it because like the cliché, there are, plenty of fish in the sea. What you should hope to focus on in your dating is lifelong happiness filled with plenty of joy and adventures.
Go forth and enjoy the buffet dear friend. Who knows, you may end up loving the dessert much more. (Wink )
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