How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love

by Logan Ury

And if we were, I wouldn’t have a job. I’m a dating coach and matchmaker. I studied psychology at Harvard and have spent years researching human behavior and relationships. This work has led me to Intentional Love, my philosophy for creating healthy relationships. Intentional Love asks you to view your love life as a series of choices rather than accidents.

Dan Ariely to run a group at Google called the Irrational Lab, a nod to his book Predictably Irrational.

I believe our natural errors in decision-making cause us to stumble.

But awareness on its own doesn’t lead to action.

Intentional Love is informed by both relationship science (what works for long-term relationships)

Dating itself only began in the 1890s. Online dating started in 1994 with Kiss.com, followed shortly by Match.com a year later.

Psychologists, including Barry Schwartz, professor emeritus at Swarthmore, have shown that while people crave choice, too many options can make us feel less happy and more doubtful of our decisions. They call this the paradox of choice.

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. Whether we’re selecting the most authentic taco place or the best-performing vacuum cleaner, we can consult endless rankings and reviews. It feels like if we can research all our choices, then we can select the right one.

Years ago, people lived in communal villages. They witnessed other couples being affectionate, fighting, and making up. There was no such thing as a private problem. Today our primary view into other people’s relationships is staged, curated, Instagram-filtered social media feeds—excited mid-hike engagement announcements, vacation pictures with a snoozing baby strapped on someone’s chest. This leads us to feel like we’re the only ones experiencing heart-wrenching struggles in our love lives (just in much less flattering lighting). Feeling like everyone else’s relationship is perfect when yours is floundering (or nonexistent) exacerbates that pain.

The Three Dating Tendencies. Each group struggles with unrealistic expectations—of themselves, of partners, and of romantic relationships.

In comparison, those with the work-it-out mindset believe that relationships take effort, that love is an action you take, not something that happens to you. People with the work-it-out mindset tend to fare better in relationships because when they stumble, they put in the work needed to get the relationship back on track, rather than giving up.

Alain de Botton studies how our views on love have changed over time. He’s a philosopher who runs the School of Life, a crash course in how to design a meaningful existence. He’s also written two profound novels on relationships—On Love and The Course of Love.

It wasn’t until around 1750 that the idea of marrying for love took hold. It all dates back to the age of Romanticism, an ideological movement that began in Europe, with philosophers waxing poetic about love, and eventually took

I call this the Happily-Ever-After Fallacy—the false notion that the hard part of love is finding someone.

Rom-coms are Disney fairy tales for people old enough to buy their own movie tickets.

The rom-com promotes the idea that love finds you and not the other way around. That love at first sight is real. That all you have to do is live your life (and consume vast amounts of tomatoes while hanging out at the farmers’ market) and one day your future husband or wife will magically appear.

The magic of a relationship doesn’t depend on a serendipitous or cinematic meeting. The magic lies in the fact that two strangers come together and create a life. It’s not important where or how they met.

Love happens in these moments, not in spite of them. Love is so much more than a filtered photo captured at sunset.

People with soul mate beliefs reject promising partners because they don’t match their vision for what love should look and feel like. They think that love will just happen to them. They expect love to be effortless. If it’s not, they must be with the wrong person.

On the other end of the spectrum are Satisficers (a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice”). They have standards, but they aren’t overly concerned that there might be something better out there. They know their criteria, and they hunt until they find the “good enough” option. It’s not that they settle; they’re simply fine making a decision once they’ve gathered some evidence and identified a satisfactory option.

Maximizers obsess over their decision-making. They trust that careful analysis will ultimately make their life better. But that’s not true. Not only are Satisficers able to make good decisions, they tend to wind up happier about them. That’s because—and it’s worth repeating—satisficing is not about settling. Satisficers may have very high standards and stop only after those standards have been met. The difference is, once they stop, they don’t worry about what else is out there. Maximizers, on the other hand, may find an option that meets their standards, but they feel compelled to explore all possibilities.

But this perfect person (and complete certainty) doesn’t exist. That’s why maximizing leads to anguish, delays in decision-making, and missed opportunities. In other words, it’s better to be a Satisficer.

They also suffer from the less catchy FOMTWD (fear of making the wrong decision). They think maximizing will help them make the perfect choice and alleviate their anxiety. But FOMTWD creates an immense amount of pressure. Anything less than perfection feels like failure.

Hardly anything exacerbates the Maximizer tendency more than choosing a long-term partner. Maximizers fear making a mistake. What if I get divorced and have to raise my children on my own? What if I dread coming home after work because I have nothing to say to my wife? What if I’m so bored that I have an affair?

Our life, once scripted by culture, religion, and family, is now a blank page. This grants us the freedom to express ourselves more fully. But we’re also burdened by the pressure to get it right. When we are the authors of our own story and that story sucks, we have no one to blame but ourselves. No wonder we can get trapped in analysis paralysis.

Meanwhile, your Satisficer friend is also on the market for an espresso maker. She goes to the mall, pops into a Nespresso store, tells an employee what she’s looking for, and walks out with a reasonably priced machine. She tells you how much she adores the process of making her daily latte, from selecting the fun-colored pods to steaming her milk.

But who feels better about the decision?

Satisficers report feeling happier with their choices, even when they select an objectively worse option. (I mean, come on. Your friend’s Nespresso machine didn’t even make Wirecutter’s top picks!) That’s because Maximizers constantly second-guess themselves. They suffer doubly: first in the agony leading up to the decision, and again every time they worry they’ve made the wrong one.

Psychologist and The Paradox of Choice author Barry Schwartz explains that what separates Maximizers and Satisficers is not the quality of their decisions, it’s how these decisions make them feel: “Maximizers make good decisions and end up feeling bad a...

Satisficers inherently understand this idea—and benefit from it.

You should interview 37 percent of the candidates and then pause. Identify the best person from this first group.

Steven had learned to satisfice.

They don’t settle, they merely stop worrying what else is out there once they’ve made a decision.

Research shows that Satisficers tend to be happier, because in the end, satisfaction comes from how you feel about your decision, not the decision itself.

Behavioral science warns us of the dreaded intention-action gap, when we intend to do something but don’t take the steps to make it happen. Your intention is to start dating. But you may get stuck in the gap between wanting to date and doing it.

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

once you commit to something, your brain starts the magical process of rationalization, convincing you that you made a good choice. You retroactively ascribe more positive traits to things you chose and more negative traits to things you didn’t. The students who had to choose a final photo committed to their picture right away, immediately launching the rationalization process. Those who had the chance to change their selection spent the week going back and forth, weighing the different options. This led to feelings of doubt, so that even when they stuck with their original photo, they felt less sure about it. When your brain accepts something and you move on, you aren’t left agonizing over the decision.

In other words, we want reversible decisions, but irrevocable ones make us happier in the long term.

Attached, by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller, and Hold Me Tight, by Sue Johnson,

As adults, they’re afraid of abandonment and want to be in constant contact with their partners.”

“Anxiously attached folks,” I said, “and I’m not pointing any fingers here, also engage in ‘protest behavior.’”

They develop into avoidantly attached adults: They try to minimize the pain of rejection by pretending they don’t actually want to connect. They don’t believe they can rely on others to meet their emotional needs, so they avoid getting too close to anyone. When intimacy increases, they try to pull away. Those attempts to disengage are called “deactivating strategies.” If you’ve heard someone say, “I’m not ready to commit” or “I just need space” or “My job is really demanding so I can’t see you right now,” then you’ve experienced avoidantly attached behavior.

People with this attachment style also tend to dwell on their partner’s imperfections and use those as an excuse to exit the relationship and regain independence.

It’s called the “anxious-avoidant loop.”

People with this attachment style fear losing their independence.

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.”

The same goes for you, my avoidantly attached readers. Find yourself a secure partner!

self-regulate—managing disruptive impulses and emotions. She trained herself not to panic when she didn’t immediately hear back from someone. In those moments, she practiced quieting her anxieties by either taking a walk or calling a friend. (Both healthier options than sending fourteen texts to the guy she’d met in the elevator at work the day before.)

Learn to ask for space instead of disappearing into space. Or when you sense yourself focusing on your partner’s shortcomings and wanting to leave because of them, try a different technique: Practice looking for the positive qualities instead. Remember that no one is perfect, and if you leave, the next person you meet won’t be perfect, either.