Choosing a Life Partner: Top Mistakes to Avoid

11/12/2017 The biggest mistakes people make when choosing a life partner — Quartz
The biggest mistakes people

make when choosing a life
partner
Tim Urban August 11, 2015
 It's not just during the honeymoon period. (Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon)
This post originally appeared at WaitButWhy.com.
To a frustrated single person, life can often feel like this:
https://qz.com/474766/the-biggest-mistakes-people-make-when-choosing-a-life-partner/ 1/18
And at rst glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people
are on 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:
Dissatis ed 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 nd a great relationship is one step away from it, with their to-do list
reading, “1) 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 break-up. 2) Emotionally recover. 3) Find a great relationship.” Not as bad
when you look at it that way, right?
All the research on how vastly happiness varies between happy and unhappy
marriages makes perfect sense, of course. It’s your life partner.
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.
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.
(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 in uence 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 dissatis ed 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, when single, 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.
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 a relationship.
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.
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 nd
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% a
response…to market conditions and just 2% 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 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 re ection 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 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 nd 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 real limitation 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
nd a life partner but that they should under-think, under-explore, and hurry up,
and combine that with biology that drugs us as we try to gure 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.
The overly romantic person repeatedly ignores the little voice that tries to speak up
when he and his girlfriend are ghting constantly or when he seems to feel much
worse about himself these days than he used to before the relationship, shutting
the voice down with thoughts like “Everything happens for a reason and the way
we met couldn’t have just been coincidence” and “I’m totally in love with her, and
that’s all that matters”—once an overly romantic person believes he’s found his
soul mate, he stops questioning things, and he’ll hang onto that belief all the way
through his 50 years of unhappy marriage.
Fear-driven Frida
Fear is one of the worst possible decision-makers when it comes to picking the
right life partner. Unfortunately, the way society is set up, fear starts infecting all
kinds of otherwise-rational people, sometimes as early as the mid-twenties. The
types of fear our society (and parents, and friends) in ict upon us—fear of being
the last single friend, fear of being an older parent, sometimes just fear of being
judged or talked about—are the types that lead us to settle for a not-so-great
partnership. 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 the fear-driven people risk because they’re trying to be risk-averse.
Externally-inﬂuenced Ed
Externally-In uenced 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
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 speci c
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 signi cant other whom you suspect was chosen more
because of the boxes they checked than for their personality underneath is a “scan-
tron boyfriend” or a “scan-tron wife,” etc.—because they correctly ll out all the
bubbles. I’ve gotten some good mileage out of that one.
Selﬁsh Stanley
The sel sh come in three, sometimes-overlapping varieties:
The “my way or the highway” type

This person cannot handle sacri ce or compromise. She believes her needs and
desires and opinions are simply more 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 sacri ces a chance to be part of a
team of equals, almost certainly limiting the potential quality of her marriage.
The main character
The Main Character’s tragic aw 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.
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
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.
So what makes a happy life partnership? We’ll explore in Part 2 of this post.
Wait But Why posts regularly. They send each post out by email to over 500,000 people
—enter your email here and they’ll put you on the list (they only send a few emails
each month). If you like this, check out Taming the mammoth: Why you should stop
caring what other people think, Ten types of 30-year-old single guys, and Ten types of
odd friendships you’re probably part of. You can also follow Wait But Why on
Facebook and Twitter. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
FIXED IT FOR YOU
We edited Louis C.K.’s “apology”

to make it a real apology
Leah Fessler, Annalisa Merelli & Sari Zeidler November 10, 2017
 TL;DR: I am sorry. (Quartz)
Louis C.K. has issued a public statement to ve women who accused him of sexual
misconduct, including masturbating in front of them on multiple occasions.
Louis C.K. admits that all of the allegations against him, which were made public
in a Nov. 9 New York Times report (paywall), are true. He also apologizes for the
damage he has done to these women.
However, Louis C.K.’s “apology” devolves into an attempt to paint himself as

suffering and worthy of sympathy. He says that until the Times report, he did not
realize the full extent of the harm he caused women by taking out his penis and
masturbating in front of them. He also tries to reduce his culpability by noting that,
at the time of his actions, he thought simply asking if it was OK to masturbate in
front of women was enough to guarantee consent.
What’s more, Louis C.K. does not mention his attempts to cover up his actions, nor
his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the accusations that have been made several
times before.
He does, however, make sure to note how “admired” he was, and is, both by the
women he harassed, and the comedy industry at large. In fact, he repeats it four
times in his statement.
We took it upon ourselves to edit Louis C.K.’s “apology” in order to make it a real
apology. This is how we believe it should read:
I want to address the stories told to the New York Times by ve women named
Abby, Rebecca, Dana, Julia who felt able to name themselves and one who did
not
not.
These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay
because I never showed a woman my dick without asking rst, which is
also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have
power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a
question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is
that they admired me and I was in a position to affect their success. And I
wielded that power irresponsibly abusively.
I have been remorseful am sorry.
And I’ve tried to learn from them. And run from them. Now I’m aware of
the extent of the impact of my actions. I learned yesterday the extent to
which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves
and cautious around other men who would never have put them in that
position.
I also took advantage of the fact that I was widely admired powerful in my and
their community, which disabled them from sharing their story and brought
hardship to them when they tried because people who look up to me didn’t
want to hear it. I didn’t think that I was doing any of that because m. My
position allowed me not to think worry about it.
There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for. And I have to reconcile it
with who I am. Which is nothing compared to the task I left them with.
I wish I had reacted to their admiration of me by being a good example to

them as a man and given them some guidance as a comedian, including
because I admired their work.
The hardest regret to live with is what you’ve done to hurt someone else.
11/12/2017 g y choosing a life partner — Quartz
The biggest mistakes people make when
And I can hardly wrap my head around the scope of hurt I brought on
them. I’d be remiss to exclude the hurt that I’ve brought on people who I work
with and have worked with who’s whose professional and personal lives have
been impacted by all of this, including projects currently in production: the cast
and crew of Better Things, Baskets, The Cops, One Mississippi, and I Love You
Daddy. I deeply regret that this has brought negative attention to my
manager Dave Becky who only tried to mediate a situation that I caused.
I’ve brought anguish and hardship to the people at FX who have given me so
much, The Orchard who took a chance on my movie and, every other entity that
has bet on me through the years.
I’ve brought pain to my family, my friends, my children and their mother.
I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I
will now step back and take a long time to listen.
Thank you for reading.

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11/12/2017 The biggest mistakes people make when choosing a life partner — Quartz

The biggest mistakes people

 It's not just during the honeymoon period. (Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon)

This post originally appeared at WaitButWhy.com.

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

Dissatis ed single people should actually consider themselves in a neutral, fairly

So how big a deal is it?

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

Society has it all wrong and gives us terrible advice

Society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search

Society rushes us.

Our biology is doing us no favors

Biological clocks are a bitch.

Overly romantic Ronald

needs to have checked—things like his height, job prestige, wealth-level,

The sel sh come in three, sometimes-overlapping varieties:

The “my way or the highway” type

The main character

The Main Character’s tragic aw is being massively self-absorbed. He wants a life

FIXED IT FOR YOU

We edited Louis C.K.’s “apology”

 TL;DR: I am sorry. (Quartz)

However, Louis C.K.’s “apology” devolves into an attempt to paint himself as

I have been remorseful am sorry.

I wish I had reacted to their admiration of me by being a good example to

I’ve brought pain to my family, my friends, my children and their mother.

Thank you for reading.

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