Wait But Why - How to Pick Your Life Partner Flashcards

(3 cards)

1
Q

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”.

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: 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

When you choose a life partner, you’re choosing your parenting partner, someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for 20,000 meals, your travel companion for 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you’ll hear 18,000 times.

Society encourages us to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide.

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.

A

Society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search for potential partners.

People end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might be to those candidates.

Society rushes us.

In our world, the major rule is to get married before you’re too old.

The rule should be “whatever you do, don’t marry the wrong person,”.

Society frowns 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.

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.

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2
Q

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 but that they should under-think, under-explore, and hurry up, and combine that with biology that drugs us as we try to figure it out and promises to stop producing children before too long, what do you get?

The “Main Character’s” tragic flaw 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.

Achieving life happiness is all about learning to be happy on a routine weekday. I think the same idea applies to marriage.

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 a marriage as a whole.

But 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 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, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.

A

Marriage isn’t the honeymoon in Thailand—it’s day four of vacation #56 that you take together. Marriage is not celebrating the closing of the deal on the first house—it’s having dinner in that house for the 4,386th time. And it’s certainly not Valentine’s Day.

Marriage is Forgettable Wednesday. Together.

To endure 20,000 days with another human being and do so happily, there are three key ingredients necessary:

1) An Epic Friendship

A Traffic Test-passing friendship entails:

A great sense of humour
Fun. And the ability to extract fun out of unfun situations—airport delays, long drives, errands.
A respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking.
A decent number of common interests, activities, and people-preferences.

2) A Feeling of Home

Feeling “at home” means feeling safe, cozy, natural, and utterly yourself, and in order to have this feeling with a partner, a few things need to be in place:

  • Trust and security
  • Natural chemistry. Interacting should be easy and natural, energy levels should be in the same vicinity, and you should feel on the same “wavelength” in general.
  • Acceptance of human flaws. You’re flawed. And so is your current or future life-partner. Being flawed is part of the definition of being a human.
  • A generally positive vibe.
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3
Q

3) A Determination to be Good at Marriage

Relationships are hard. So what skills does someone need to learn to be good at marriage?

  • Communication. Poor communication is the downfall of a huge number of couples. Communication is hard to do well consistently.
  • Maintaining equality. Relationships can slip into an unequal power dynamic pretty quickly.
  • Fighting well. Fighting is inevitable. But there are good and bad ways to fight. When a couple is good at fighting, they defuse tension, approach things with humor, and genuinely listen to the other side, while avoiding getting nasty, personal or defensive. They also fight less often than a bad couple.

And since this is a daunting list to try to achieve in a life partnership, you probably don’t want to make things even harder than they need to be by insisting upon too many other checkboxes—most of which will not have a large effect on your happiness during dinner #4,386 of your marriage.

I hope Valentine’s Day was good for you this year, whatever you did for it. Just remember that Forgettable Wednesday is a much more important day.

A

The ONS has found that being married is 20 times more important to a person’s well-being than their earnings, and 13 times more important than owning a home.

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