How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science of Finding Love

by Logan Ury

Selecting a partner is already an incredibly daunting task, one weighed down with cultural baggage, bad advice, and societal and familial pressure.

We live in an information-rich society that offers the false comfort of research. It can feel like the perfect decision is only a few more Google searches away.

The Romanticizer You want the soul mate, the happily ever after—the whole fairy tale. You love love. You believe you are single because you haven’t met the right person yet. Your motto: It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen.

The Romanticizer has unrealistic expectations of relationships.

The rom-com promotes the idea that love finds you and not the other way around.

your future husband or wife will magically appear. While I acknowledge that people do meet in real life all the time—at parties, events, even protests—the problem with this idea is that it gives people permission to be overly passive in their love lives.

Will you worry that their love is conditional? That they’ll leave you if you lose your job, tailspin, develop a ravenous cheddar cheese addiction, and gain twenty-five pounds?

we’re less committed to choices we think we can reverse, and commitment is crucial for happiness.

After less than a year of marriage, they could no longer ignore their discontent. “I really feel like our whole relationship was propelled by our how-we-met story,” he said. “If we hadn’t had this picturesque story of meeting abroad, of love at first sight, I don’t know that we ever would’ve gotten married. Our whole lives were trying to live up to that fantasy meeting.” Don’t pursue the wrong relationship because you met the “right” way.

In dating, that means holding on to a bad relationship. We’re more terrified of the potential loss of our partner than intrigued by the potential gain of the person we could date instead.