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

by Logan Ury

For Hesitaters, there’s a story in your head that one day you’ll wake up and feel ready. That story is fiction. That’s not how life works. Everyone feels awkward sometimes. Most people feel nervous in high-pressure situations. Many of us have a part of ourselves we don’t want to reveal to others. And yet these very same people still go out on dates and kiss people and fall in love and break up and fall in love again and get married.

Now she realizes that her lack of experience complicates her search for a good match: “I missed out on experimentation. I don’t know my likes and dislikes. And now it feels a lot harder to find a partner without that information.”

I’m constantly surprised by how many of my clients think they should naturally know how to date. Dating

I tell my clients they need to get in their reps. A “rep” is a single movement (or repetition) of an exercise. At the gym, you get stronger by doing multiple reps. In dating, you get stronger by going on more dates.

Behavioral scientists Suzanne Shu and Ayelet Gneezy looked at how often people redeemed gift certificates to a bakery. When the certificate was good for two months, fewer than 10 percent of people redeemed it for a pastry. (The rest were too flaky!) But when the certificate was good for only three weeks, suddenly, more than 30 percent of people redeemed the coupon.

With the shorter deadline, people were more aware that they could miss the window, so they took more immediate action.

One day, instead of our normal session, and perhaps inspired by a recent Queer Eye marathon, I took Jacob shopping. It was time to show his body some love.

But when the researchers surveyed the students, the group that couldn’t change their minds about their pictures was much more satisfied than the group that could.

While we instinctively prefer reversible decisions to irreversible ones, this flexibility often make us less happy in the long run.

We’d rather be able to change our minds—return our new phone, switch our flight to a different day, reply “maybe” to an event. But it turns out, just like the students who could switch their pictures, we’re less committed to choices we think we can reverse, and commitment is crucial for happiness.

Another group of babies cried when their mother left but stopped as soon as she returned. They quickly resumed playing. These were the “securely attached” babies.

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People with this attachment style fear losing their independence.

“Those are the securely attached babies, who felt confident their mothers would meet their needs. People with a secure attachment style make ideal partners. They’re reliable and trustworthy. They tend to avoid drama and, if not, are able to defuse it when they see it coming. They’re flexible, forgiving, and good at communicating. They behave consistently.

The problem is that while securely attached people make up 50 percent of the general population, there are far fewer in the single population. That’s because secure people tend to get snatched up quickly. They’re good at building healthy relationships, so they tend to stay in them. That’s why the dating pool is full of anxious and avoidant daters.

She started looking for secure partners. It took time. She’d go out with someone new and complain that they were “boring.” When I dug deeper, I discovered this usually meant the person was being nice to her. For example, she told a guy with whom she’d been on two dates that she was visiting Seattle the next weekend. He then sent her a list of restaurant recommendations. When she told me that story, she ended by saying: “And that’s why I never want to see him again.” “Wait, what?” I said. “He clearly likes me way too much. It’s pathetic.” I did my best to help her see the situation differently. This guy was trying to be helpful because he liked her. It was a secure act and not a pathetic one. We worked on helping her break that anxious-avoidant loop.

Changing your attachment style on your own can be challenging. There are so many unconscious reasons we are the way we are, and mining the past may bring up unexpected and difficult questions. How does our relationship with our mom relate to our attachment style?

Many of us struggle to make good choices for our future selves—and not just when it comes to dating. We’re guilty of this when we procrastinate on household chores (although we know we have to do them eventually), when we don’t exercise (although we know it’s important for long-term health), and when we spend money frivolously (although we know we should save it).

present bias, an error in judgment that causes us to place a disproportionately high value on the here and now and an inappropriately low value on the future.

She once explained to me the difference between a love story and a life story. There are many people with whom you can share a tryst but far fewer with whom you can build a life.

helpful rule of thumb for those of you who want to have children: You should deliberately change the way you evaluate potential partners around six to eight years before you want to have kids.

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

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” Merely thinking about something accentuates the differences.

When we’re younger and we enter a relationship, it’s like a start-up—two people coming together to build something. We’re more flexible and still figuring out what we want. When we’re older and thinking about long-term relationships and, eventually, marriage, the process is more like a merger: two complete beings coming together.

The older we get, the more set in our ways we are, and the more we crave someone who will easily fit into our lives. We assume that the more similar we are, the easier the merger will be. But that assumption is wrong.

Research tells us that similar personalities are not a predictor of long-ter...

One easy way to estimate someone’s loyalty is to see if they have friends from different stages of their lives. How many old friendships have they carried with them over the years? Did they ditch their college bestie when they got depressed, or do they still meet up for monthly movie matinees?

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?

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

Pay attention to how you feel when you’re around this person or right after you finish spending time together. Energized? Deflated? Bored? Challenged? Happy? Desired? Smart? Stupid? Select someone who brings out the best side of you.

Instead of asking, “What did you think of him?” ask, “What did you think of me around him?”

The first step in fighting well is understanding that there are two types of problems in relationships: solvable problems and perpetual ones—unsolvable, permanent features of your partnership. John Gottman discovered that 69 percent of all relationship conflicts are perpetual.

The goal is not to convince each other to change or even to come to an agreement—it’s to find a productive way to live with this difference.

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, or telling their partner what they appreciate about them.

Where had I gone wrong? No dating advice I’d encountered had covered that moment in your life when you’re on the street, alone, outside of a lame club, eyeliner and snot dripping down your face, pining after someone who sends mixed messages and makes you feel foolish.

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.

“Your homework is to focus on how you want to feel in your relationship.” During our next meeting, I shared my response: “I want him to make me feel smart, funny, appreciated, and secure in our relationship.”

But we never went down that road. Instead, Scott wrote back, “Let’s chat in person about this one.”

pliable.

Here’s an example of how that plays out with our food choices. A few years ago, Google diagnosed its employees with “an M&M problem.” To nudge them into making healthier food decisions, an internal team of behavioral scientists changed the environment in which the snacks were presented. They stopped offering M&M’s in giant clear bins that enticed snackers with the multicolored chocolate treats. They moved the candies to clearly labeled but opaque containers, where they would be less tempting. Healthier snacks, like dried figs and pistachios, sat nearby in clear glass jars. These were bright tech workers who had known the healthy snacks were available the whole time. But merely changing the environment in which food choices were presented resulted in employees eating 3.1 million fewer M&M calories over seven weeks in the New York office alone.

Interesting

If you’d asked me when I was swiping what I’d wanted in a partner, do you think I would’ve said “five-eight redheaded vegan engineer”?

Most of us have no idea what kind of partner will fulfill us long term.

Of course, we could change our preferences on the dating apps after we sign up, but most people don’t. This is because of something called the status quo bias—our tendency to leave things as they are, to not rock the boat.

many consumer items are “searchable goods”: things like cameras, laundry detergent, and big-screen TVs that can be measured based on their objective attributes. These differ from “experience goods,” which they define as being “judged by the feelings they evoke, rather than the functions they perform. Examples include movies, perfume, puppies, and restaurant meals—goods defined by attributes that are subjective, aesthetic, holistic, emotive, and tied to the production of sensation.

We’ve all seen a movie that got bad reviews but made us laugh. Or tasted wine that earned amazing reviews but didn’t taste good to us. We’ve been pleasantly surprised or surprisingly disappointed by experiencing these goods ourselves. The process of evaluation was more personal than just knowing that we wanted a wide-angle lens.

People, the authors of this paper tell us, are experience goods. We are not like cameras. We are much more like wine. (If you’re like me, you’re also full-bodied...

Apps primarily give us a list of résumé traits and nothing more. Only by spending time with someone can you appreciate that person for the “experiential good” they are.

Our brains aren’t set up to select a partner from so many options.

We assume that more choice will make us happier, but that’s often not the case. In fact, too many options make us less happy,

It can feel so overwhelming to compare our options that we may give up and make no decision at all.