The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now

by Meg Jay

The problem is, while people are good at matching themselves and others on relatively obvious criteria, such as age and education, it turns out that these qualities are what researchers call “deal breakers, not match makers.” Deal breakers are your own personal sine qua non in relationships. They are qualities—almost always similarities—you feel are nonnegotiable. The absence of these similarities allows you to weed out people with whom you have fundamental differences. Maybe it is a deal breaker if someone is not Christian because you want to share spirituality and community. Perhaps you cannot imagine being with someone who is not intellectually curious because you value enriching conversation in your relationships. Sometimes people can even agree to disagree about very apparent, circumscribed differences, like Republican-Democrat couples who joke about their “mixed marriages.” Either way, people decide for themselves early on what their own deal breakers are, and, typically, we select partners accordingly. But these conspicuous similarities are not match makers. They may bring us together, but they don’t necessarily make us happy.