‘I want a man who’s kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?’
Zsa Zsa Gabor, actress and socialite (1917-2016)
Zsa Zsa Gabor, actress and socialite (1917-2016)
The search for ‘The One’ can indeed feel futile. You might test what can feel like endless candidates and not find anyone you really like. You can travel great distances but never reach the Promised Land. Even when this land seems to be found, there is no lifetime guarantee, and the expiration date of this happy kingdom might be brief. Breakups, not long-term relationships, appear to be the norm. In many societies, about half of all marriages end in divorce, and lots of the remaining half have at some point seriously considered it.
In light of these difficulties, doubts have been raised concerning the value of this kind of search. One person might dismiss the quest altogether. ‘Done with trying to find a woman for life. Much easier to just hook up for a good short time. Avoid all the other personal drama!’ as one man told me. Another stops the search early, after finding profound love and connection when very young. ‘I’ve never regretted not ordering the fish when my steak arrived cooked and seasoned to my liking,’ said a woman who married her first lover. Yet others say they’ve found The One yet continue sampling what’s out there. ‘I want both – a long, profound love and a series of short, intense romantic-sexual experiences. Lust and profound love are both meaningful and satisfying for me,’ another woman explains. (...)Despite these kinds of caveats, when it comes of finding The One, strategy counts, starting with the very definition of ‘perfect’. One dictionary definition is flawless: being entirely without fault or defect. The other is most suitable: being as good as possible, and completely appropriate. While the first meaning focuses on eliminating the negative, the second centres on finding as much positive as one can.
Clearly, the search for the flawless person is an exercise in utter futility. Through this lens, the beloved is seen as a kind of icon, without relation to the partner. Here, one looks at qualities that stand on their own, such as intelligence, appearance, humour or wealth. This sort of measure has two advantages – it is easy to use, and most people would agree about the assessments. It’s an approach that takes a static view, in which romantic love is essentially fixed – and that’s something we know doesn’t work well in the real world.
On the other hand, looking for the most suitable person under a given set of circumstances might allow you to build an intimate connection, and could yield a flourishing partnership. This view emphasises the uniqueness of the relationship; it sees the beloved’s most important qualities in relationship to the partner, and offers a dynamic kind of romantic love over time. Such love involves intrinsic development that includes bringing out the best in each other. The suitability scale is much more complex, since it depends on personal and environmental factors about which we do not have full knowledge.
Ultimately, both scales count. So in seeking a true life partner, it’s worth considering the equation for yourself. Should you marry a smart person? Generally speaking, intelligence is considered good – but here is where things get more complicated. If there is a big gap between the IQ of the two partners, their suitability for each other will be low because, in this particular realm, the trait, though nonrelational, is significant to relationship success.
The same goes for wealth. On the nonrelational scale, a lot of money is often good, but a wealthy person might score low on fidelity (fat bank accounts open many romantic doors). Moreover, wealthy people tend to believe that they are more deserving, and hence their caring behaviour might be lower. In the same vein, having a good sexual appetite is usually good, but a large discrepancy between the partners’ sexual needs is not conducive to that crucial romantic connection. If, for instance, a man wants to have sex once or twice a week and a woman wishes to have sex multiple times a day, would they be suitable partners? Clearly not. And even if all these nonrelational factors match up, partners still won’t bring out the best in each other unless they truly connect.
For many people, the quest for the perfect person based on qualities such as beauty, intelligence and wealth (instead of the perfect partner, who offers connection and flourishing) is a major obstacle to finding The One. Since life is dynamic and people change their attitudes, priorities and wishes over time, achieving such romantic compatibility is not a onetime accomplishment, but an ongoing process of mutual interactions. In a crucial and perhaps little-understood switch, perfect compatibility is not necessarily a precondition for love; it is love and time that often create a couple’s compatibility.
Can a person cognisant of the two scales use this knowledge to aid the quest? There’s a calculus, it turns out. We all know the drill. You compile a checklist of the perfect partner’s desirable and undesirable traits, and tick off each trait that your prospective partner has. This search approach is pretty much how online dating works: it focuses on negative, superficial qualities, and tries to quickly filter out unsuitable candidates. Eliminating bad options is natural in an environment of abundant romantic options.
But the checklist practice is flawed because it typically lacks any intrinsic hierarchy weighting the different traits. For instance, it fails to put kindness ahead of humour, or intelligence before wealth. And it focuses on the other person’s qualities in isolation, scarcely giving any weight to the connection between the individuals; in short, it fails to consider the value of the other person as a suitable partner.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the US Founding Fathers, counselled his nephew to use knowledge to find a wife: one should proceed like a bookkeeper, he advised – list all the pros and cons, weigh up everything for two or three days, and then make a decision. But research from 1999 by the psychologists Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Daniel Goldstein, now at Microsoft in New York, shows that computer-based versions of Franklin’s rational bookkeeping manner – a program that weighed 18 different cues – proved less accurate than following the rule of thumb: ‘Get one good reason and ignore the rest of the information.’
Still, under clear-cut circumstances, the checklist can work. When the feeling is outright disinterest, you can eliminate the individual based on some unacceptable objective trait (such as an unpleasant laugh or dandruff) and a lack of simpatico. So the score for that person on both scales would be: superficial and negative. (...)
Then there’s the scenario in Graeme Simsion’s popular novel, The Rosie Project (2013). The protagonist, Don Tillman, is a university professor seeking a wife, and so he prepares a detailed list of what he’s looking for in a woman: someone intelligent but also a good cook, who is physically fit, as well as a teetotal nonsmoker. Don rules out many women until he meets Rosie, a bartender who smokes, drinks and otherwise fails on most of his criteria. Together, they search for Rosie’s biological father and, in the process, Don falls in love with Rosie. It is not her individual characteristics that generate his love. It is the harmony he feels while spending more and more time with her, which makes all the difference. There’s something ‘off’, but you like – okay, love – the person anyway. After all, we can learn to live with superficial flaws, but profound flaws and lack of intimacy pose a real danger to a long-term loving relationship. Score: negative but profound. This is a life worth considering – and better, by the odds, than the options above.
Finally, you might hit the jackpot. You like the outside package, and you bring out the best in each other, all at once. In 2002, the social psychologist Stephen Drigotas at Southern Methodist University in Dallas demonstrated that when a close romantic partner sees and acts toward you in a manner that matches your ideal self, you move closer to that self, an effect he calls ‘the Michelangelo Phenomenon’. Just as Michelangelo saw sculpting as his process of releasing the ideal forms hidden in the marble, our romantic partners ‘sculpt’ us. Close partners sculpt one another in a manner that brings each individual closer to his or her ideal self, thus bringing out the best in each other and making both feel good about themselves. In such relationships, we see personal growth and flourishing in statements such as: ‘I’m a better person when I am with her.’ Score: positive and profound.
For most of human history, marriage was a practical arrangement designed to enable the couple to meet their basic survival and social needs. Passionate love had precious little to do with it. The American historian Stephanie Coontz, the author of Marriage, a History (2006), shows that this ideal emerged only about 200 years ago. She observes that: ‘In many cultures, love has been seen as a desirable outcome of marriage, but not as a good reason for getting married in the first place.’ The French philosopher Pascal Bruckner, the author of Has Marriage for Love Failed? (2010), argues that in the past marriage was sacred, and love, if it existed at all, was a kind of bonus; now, love is sacred and marriage is secondary. Accordingly, the number of marriages has been declining, while divorces, cohabitation and single-parent families are increasing. It seems that, as he puts it, ‘love has triumphed over marriage but now it is destroying it from inside’.
In addition to the pragmatic and the loved-based marriage types, the psychologist Eli Finkel at Northwestern University in Illinois adds the personal fulfilment marriage – or, as his book puts it, The All-or-Nothing Marriage (2017) – which developed in the US around 1965. As the growing demands of marriage make it impossible to find a partner who excels in all important areas, Finkel presents this third type of marriage, which requires that we compromise and accept a partner who is in some important ways good enough, if not the very best. Rather than aim high with an ideal marriage, we should be satisfied with a less-than-perfect marriage that enables us to have a family and to thrive.
Yes, there’s an optimal prescription for finding The One, but that doesn’t abolish the possibility of never finding the romantic partner of your dreams. For your own flourishing, you might need to settle for less. The question is, how much ‘less’ can your partner be, and still be a sufficiently good partner?
by Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty
