free. In a position of longing for a new person when we are constrained within an existing relationship, we must beware too of the “incumbent problem”: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing—or, as we put it, incumbent—ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home, and our committed workplace and
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