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

by Logan Ury

Brian was hot, spontaneous, and fun. But also unreliable. I never knew if he’d text me back or come over when he said he would. He knew how much I liked him. He’d act interested one day and aloof the next. I never asked myself questions like this: Is he kind and thoughtful? Do I trust his judgment? Would he remember to take our kids to the dentist? (If his own dentist-going habits were any indication, no, he would not.) Looking back, I wonder why I, someone who wanted to find a serious partner and create a long-term relationship, desperately tried to convince him to date me. Why did I keep falling for guys like Brian? My choices weren’t helping me create the relationship I wanted.

Instead of dating for long-term partnership, I was optimizing for short-term fun.

These are all moments when we fall prey to the 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.

But when you’re looking for a long-term partner, you want someone who will be there for you during the highs and the lows.

I’m lucky to count the brilliant couples therapist Esther Perel as a mentor. 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. When you’re thinking about who to marry, she says, don’t ask yourself: What would a love story with this person look like? Instead, ask: Can I make a life with this person? That’s the fundamental distinction.

If you really are seeking a long-term relationship with a committed partner, you need to stop looking for a Prom Date and start seeking a Life Partner.

You should deliberately change the way you evaluate potential partners around six to eight years before you want to have kids.

I imagine many of you—like many of my clients—are already in that critical window. I don’t mean to make you feel behind. I just want to encourage you to take yourself seriously and start dating someone who has the potential to be a serious partner.

To shift toward pursuing the Life Partner, you must learn to recognize the present bias and deliberately work against it.

However, these are not the traits my matchmaking clients tend to ask for. Instead, they focus on short-term desirability—or the characteristics of a good Prom Date.

Not only do we undervalue the qualities that matter for long-term relationships, we overvalue irrelevant ones. In part, we can blame a cognitive error called the 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.

What’s more, research from Harvard Business School found that couples who can afford to outsource time-intensive tasks like cooking and cleaning enjoy greater relationship satisfaction because they can spend more quality time together.

research by behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton famously found that there is no increase in “emotional well-being” (economist-speak for happiness) once salaries exceed $75,000 a year.

In fact, additional research suggests that the extent to which you can derive happiness from money in the first place depends on the wealth of those around you. In other words, 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.

No matter how wonderful something is, the novelty eventually wears off, and we stop paying much attention to it.

Lottery winners adapted to their environment, and their wealth had a much smaller than anticipated effect on their overall life satisfaction.

When we make a decision, we tend to focus on the immediate joy or misery it will bring. But remember: We are bad fortune-tellers! We often can’t account for how those feelings will change over time. Money matters, but only up to a certain extent. You’re not wrong for considering that element of your future relationship, but don’t prioritize wealth above all else.

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).

Lust is incredibly intense in the beginning and then fades. When we fall in love, it feels like we’re addicted to the other person, as if they’re a drug. Fisher found that cocaine and falling in love light up the same regions of the brain.

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

The question is: Would you really want to date yourself? I know I wouldn’t!

Find someone who complements you, not your personality twin.

“It’s possible you’re underestimating all the things they do share.”

If you love wine and your partner couldn’t care less about it, that’s okay; you don’t need to marry a sommelier.

What matters is that when you drink wine, or go on a trip to Napa to try a new prized cabernet sauvignon, your partner doesn’t try to make you feel guilty or say something like “Why do you always have to drink?” A good relationship has space for different people with different hobbies.

When I work with clients, I rarely hear them say their number one goal is to find someone who’s emotionally stable.

And yet these are all examples of qualities that relationship scientists have found contribute much more to long-term relationship success than superficial traits or shared interests.

In his book The Science of Happily Ever After, psychologist Ty Tashiro digs into the existing research on what matters when choosing a partner. He found that emotional stability and kindness are two of the most important and yet underrated characteristics. He defines emotional stability as being able to self-regulate and not give in to anger or impulsivity. The combined emotional stability of a couple predicts the satisfaction and stability of their relationship.

One way to get a sense of someone’s emotional stability is to pay attention to how they respond to stressful situations. Do they freak out or keep their cool? Emotionally stable partners are measured in their responses. They take time to thoughtfully respond rather than impulsively react. When I explain this concept to my clients, I quote Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and celebrated psychiatrist. He wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Someone who is emotionally stable takes advantage of that space.

Schoenthaler explains that she’s observed thousands of couples going through a crisis, which has taught her what really matters in a relationship: “It’s a privilege to witness these couples, but the downside is I find myself muttering under my breath when my single female friends show me their ads for online dating. ‘Must like long walks on beach at sunset, cats,’ they write, or ‘French food, kayaking, travel.’ Or a perennial favorite: ‘Looking for fishing buddy; must be good with bait.’ These ads make me want to climb onto my cancer doctor soapbox and proclaim, ‘Finding friends with fine fishing poles may be great in the short term. But what you really want to look for is somebody who will hold your purse in the cancer clinic.’”

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? Do people from their past seem to rely on them for companionship and support? Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, since some people have moved around a lot or lived in places where they didn’t fit in. But in general, old friendships indicate loyalty.

You want to align yourself with someone who has a growth mindset because when problems arise, which they inevitably will, you’ll want a partner who will rise to the occasion, not throw up their hands in defeat.

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.

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.

She refused to choose a lifetime of self-doubt and ended things with him.

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.

“Early is on time, on time is late, and late means don’t bother showing up.” You’ll inevitably fight over punctuality.

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.

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, or telling their partn...

While this was challenging, my client said that helping her through these tough choices revealed how well they functioned together in a challenging situation. It certainly wasn’t fun, but it demonstrated their compatibility and strengthened their relationship.

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.

I knew I was going after the wrong people, but I didn’t know how to fix it.

“Your homework is to focus on how you want to feel in your relationship.”

“I want him to make me feel smart, funny, appreciated, and secure in our relationship.”

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.

A great long-term partner is loyal, kind, and emotionally stable, a person with whom you can grow, make hard decisions, and fight constructively. 4. 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.

I thought I knew what I wanted and what would make me happy in a long-term relationship. And I believed I could accurately evaluate someone based on a few photos.