How to Pick Your Life Partner

The main reason (for ending 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.

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 ... See more

Research suggests 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 s... See more

All the research on how vastly happiness varies between happy and unhappy marriages makes perfect sense, of course. It’s your life partner.

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 childr... See more

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 dissatisfied and unhappy?

A frenzy of big decisions for bad reasons and a lot of people messing up the most important decision of their life.

• People tend to be bad at knowing what they want 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.→ Society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search for potential partners. → Society rushes us.

• Our Biology Is Doing Us No Favors

→ Human bi