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

by Logan Ury

focusing illusion—our tendency to overestimate the importance of certain factors when anticipating outcomes, like our future happiness.

it’s not really the size of your house that matters. It’s the size of your house in comparison to the size of your neighbors’ houses.

In his book The Science of Happily Ever After, psychologist Ty Tashiro analyzed a fourteen-year longitudinal study of satisfaction in marriages over time. He found that over the course of seven years, “lust” (sexual desire) for a partner declined twice as fast as “liking” (friendship characterized by loyalty and kindness).

Fisher found that cocaine and falling in love light up the same regions of the brain.

Physical attraction can obscure long-term compatibility. Pay attention to whether or not you’re attracted to someone and focus less on how society would evaluate that person’s looks. Don’t prioritize lust over more important long-term factors.

Research tells us that similar personalities are not a predictor of long-term relationship success.

Northwestern professor and marriage expert Eli Finkel, he said, “There is no correlation between how satisfied or how happy you are with a relationship and how similar your personalities are.” In other words, we make our potential pool of partners smaller by mistakenly eliminating people who are not similar enough to us.

Michigan State University researchers William Chopik and Richard Lucas studied more than twenty-five hundred married couples who had been together for an average of twenty years, they found that couples with similar personalities aren’t any more satisfied with their relationships.

People with a growth mindset believe that they can improve their intelligence and skills. They love to learn. They’re motivated by challenges and see failure as a sign that they need to stretch their abilities. They’re resilient and comfortable taking risks. Someone with a fixed mindset believes the opposite: that talent and intelligence are assigned at birth and taking a risk only presents an opportunity to embarrass yourself.

In the end, a relationship is not about who each of you is separately, it’s about what happens when the two of you come together. What does this person bring out in you? Does their kindness make you feel relaxed and cared for? Or does their anxiety provoke your anxiety?

You must understand what qualities they bring out in you, because this is who you’ll be whenever you’re with them.

As the late couples therapist Dan Wile explained in his book After the Honeymoon: “When choosing a long-term partner, you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unresolvable problems.” The goal isn’t to find someone with whom you don’t fight. It’s to choose a partner with whom you fight well, and who doesn’t make you worry that the fight will end the relationship.

The second element to fighting well is being able to recover from a disagreement.

John Gottman writes about “repair attempts,” statements or actions that prevent a fight from escalating. Successful couples are able to break the intensity of a fight by making a joke, conceding a point, o...

Dan Ariely offers something called “the canoe test.” Share a canoe. Yes, an actual canoe. Can you find a rhythm together? Is one of you comfortable leading and the other following, or do you both want to be in charge at all times? Most important, how much do you blame your partner when things go awry? Pay attention to how you literally navigate choppy water together as a team.

nexus. She helped me understand that I liked Brian because he was fun and exciting to be around but that he wasn’t really what I was looking for in a husband, and I didn’t like the anxious side of me he brought out.

focus on how you want to feel in your relationship.”

Relationship science can teach us what really matters for committed long-term relationships. Seek Life Partners: people who are trustworthy and reliable and who will stay with you for the long haul. Avoid Prom Dates: individuals who are fun in the short term but ultimately let you down.

Superficial qualities like looks and money matter less for long-term relationship success than people think they do because lust fades and people adapt to their circumstances. The same goes for shared hobbies and similar personalities.

In the end, a relationship is about what happens when the two of you come together. Focus on the side of you this person brings out, because that’s who you’ll be whenever you’re with them.

According to research by Stanford sociology professor Michael J. Rosenfeld, “met online” is the most common way romantic partners connect today, followed by “met in a bar or restaurant” and then “met through friends.”

In the last twenty years, digital dating has exploded: Rosenfeld found that while only 2 percent of couples met online in 1995, 39 percent now meet that way.

We’re affected by the way the app presents certain matches and the order in which those matches appear on our screens. That’s why my clients tell me about swiping no on someone on one app and then swiping yes on that same person on a different app a few weeks later. These small contextual differences have a big impact on our decisions.

Issue #1: Our brains focus on what’s measurable and easily comparable. Apps display superficial traits, making us value these qualities even more.

Using data from a popular dating website, Ariely found that a man has to earn $40,000 more each year to be as desirable as a man one inch taller.

This is all to say that the apps may lead us astray by emphasizing measurable and comparable qualities. They can trick us into valuing these traits while ignoring the qualities that relationship science tells us matter most.

Issue #2: We think we know what we want, but we’re wrong. The apps allow us to filter out great potential matches.

But dating apps never give you the chance to be proved wrong, because you can weed out people who aren’t your “type.”

I once conducted in-person interviews with folks who met their husband or wife offline. I asked, “If you had seen your current spouse online, would you have swiped right or left?” Many people told me they wouldn’t have seen their future partner at all because their app settings would’ve shut them out. “My age limit was up to one year older than me, and she’s five years older than me,” one guy told me. “My app setting was for Jewish men only, and he identifies as Buddhist,” another said.

Issue #3: Apps promote “relationshopping”—searching for potential partners like potential purchases.

Issue #4: Apps make us more indecisive about whom to date.

The researchers hypothesized that when you have six options, it’s possible to make a confident decision about which jam you’ll like the most. But twenty-four options are so overwhelming that people often make no decision at all.

Issue #5: When we see only a rough sketch of someone, we fill in the gaps with flattering details. We create an unrealistic fantasy of this person, which ultimately leaves us disappointed.

“She’s a full-on Monet. It’s like a painting, see. From far away, it’s okay, but up close it’s a big ol’ mess.” I call this error in judgment the Monet Effect.

Fast-forward a few months. She met a lovely guy who had never left the country before because he’d lacked the financial means to travel. However, he shared those values we’d identified. For him, that had manifested in starting his own business. She helped him get his first passport. Now they travel together constantly. If she had filtered only for people with a passport full of stamps—as

Just because you know where people have been or where they are now doesn’t mean you know where they’re going.

Go on dates with people whom you don’t necessarily think are a fit. That’s the only way you can figure out what you actually like rather than assuming you already know.

We think we know what we want when it comes to a partner, but our intuition about what will lead to long-term happiness is often wrong.

Christian Rudder analyzed the behavior of users on OkCupid, the dating site he cofounded, on both the company’s blog and in his book, Dataclysm. He reported that Black women receive 25 percent fewer first messages than women of other races. And when Black women reach out to men first, they receive responses 25 percent less often than women of other races. Asian men contend with similar behavior. Rudder found that white, Black, and Latina women rate Asian men as 30 percent less attractive than they rate men of other races.

Fortunately, we can change our mindset. Wiseman created a program called the “luck school,” where he taught unlucky and lucky volunteers to think like a lucky person. He focused on four things: listening to their intuition; expecting to be lucky; spotting chance opportunities; and rebounding more quickly when bad things happen. Assignments ranged from keeping a diary of lucky occurrences, to “visualizing good fortune,” to verbally declaring their intentions: “I am willing to put time and effort into changing my luck.” After a month, 80 percent of the luck school’s “graduating class” felt happier, more satisfied with their lives, and most important, luckier.

The Post-Date Eight What side of me did they bring out? How did my body feel during the date? Stiff, relaxed, or something in between? Do I feel more energized or de-energized than I did before the date? Is there something about them I’m curious about? Did they make me laugh? Did I feel heard? Did I feel attractive in their presence? Did I feel captivated, bored, or something in between?

When psychologist Ayala Malach Pines surveyed more than four hundred people to ask how they fell in love with their romantic partners, only 11 percent claimed that they felt “love at first sight.”

A few years ago, psychologists Paul Eastwick and Lucy Hunt explored this phenomenon. At the beginning of the semester, they asked straight male students to rank their straight female classmates’ desirability and vice versa. When Eastwick and Hunt analyzed the responses, they found that students were more or less in agreement about their classmates’ attractiveness. This initial rating, based on first impressions, is known as mate value.

Three months later, at the end of the semester, the researchers asked students to evaluate their peers again. Now that the students knew one another, the scores had much more variability. These new scores reflected what’s called unique value, what you think of someone after spending time with them.

When we first meet people, we evaluate them on their mate value—their overall attractiveness and how they carry themselves. As we get to know and share experiences with them, we disco...

People often confuse anxiety for chemistry

“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.”

slow burn—someone who may not be particularly charming upon your first meeting but would make a great long-term partner.

Context matters. You may not feel the spark with someone, simply because of the environment in which you meet.

fundamental-attribution error, our tendency to believe someone’s actions reflect who they are rather than the circumstances.