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

by Logan Ury

That’s because of a phenomenon called the peak-end rule: When assessing an experience, people judge it based largely on how they felt at the most intense moment and at the end. Their memory isn’t an average of their minute-by-minute experiences.

I designed a different kind of checklist for Jonathan: one that would help him shift from an evaluative to an experiential mindset. Instead of determining if a potential match met a particular requirement, he was able, with this list, to tune in to how he felt about his dates. It encouraged him to be present and to focus on what really matters.

He was able to more quickly reject guys who had impressive backgrounds but left him feeling cold. He allowed himself to experience the date rather than “interviewing” the guy for the role of husband.

The message is clear: The spark can grow. Sometimes it’s a tiny flame, gasping for breath. If you squelch the flame before it has time to breathe, you’ll never get to warm yourself by the fire of long-lasting love. (They should really hire me to write Hallmark cards.)

start looking for a different type of partner—someone secure who doesn’t make you doubt their feelings. Stop believing that if a dependable person doesn’t give you butterflies, it must not be love. It’s still love, just not the anxious kind.

“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.”

Don’t pursue the wrong relationship because you met the “right” way.

Plenty of good relationships start with the spark, but plenty of bad ones do, too.

The important thing to remember is that its absence doesn’t predict failure, and its presence doesn’t guarantee success.

“The spark is neither necessary nor sufficient for long-term rela...

Stop using the spark as your first-date indicator. Stop optimizing for that exciting feeling and focus on what matters, like loyalty, kindness, and how the other person makes you feel...

Ditch the spark and go for the slow burn—someone who may not be particularly charming upon your first meeting but would make a great long-term partner. Slow burns tak...

Fortunately, we can take action to override these impulses so that we don’t miss out on great matches for silly reasons. We can train our mind to look for the positive and follow the dating version of the Golden Rule: Do not judge others the way you would not want to be judged.

negativity bias, an instinct to ruminate on what’s gone wrong.

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

Seeing the positives in life is a muscle, a skill you can develop.

Psychologist Shawn Achor’s research on gratitude journals found that simply writing down three new things you are grateful for, every night for three weeks, will start to change the way your brain perceives the world. The exercise trains you to notice things you might have otherwise missed, like how wonderful it is to catch the bus right before it leaves or how good it feels to laugh with your coworker.

Rather than focusing on someone’s negative traits, use your “imagination” to “search for what is desirable and good.”

Do not judge others the way you would not want to be judged.”

Letting go of that faulty list of requirements was a game changer—it enabled me to focus on our experiences together.”

Stop confusing pet peeves with dealbreakers.

What are critical dealbreakers for you? And what are just preferences or nice-to-haves? This

Second, our views about ourselves change over time, depending on how we behave. According to psychologist Daryl Bem’s self-perception theory, this happens because we don’t have access to our inner thoughts and feelings. We look to our actions to tell us who we are. This helps explain why research shows that volunteering is one of the most reliable ways to boost our happiness. Volunteers consistently see higher levels of happiness and self-esteem than non-volunteers, because when they’re done, they look at their actions and think, I’m spending my time helping people. I must be pretty generous after all!

Psychologists describe two ways couples transition into the next stage of a relationship: deciding or sliding. Deciding means making intentional choices about relationship transitions, like becoming exclusive or having children. Sliding entails slipping into the next stage without giving it much thought. This distinction matters. The National Marriage Project, an annual report on American marriages conducted by researchers at the University of Virginia, found that couples who made a conscious choice to advance to the next stage of their relationship enjoyed higher-quality marriages than those who slid into the next stage. Furthermore, researchers from the University of Louisville and the University of Denver found that individuals who tend to “slide” through relationship milestones feel less dedicated to their partners and engage in more extramarital affairs. These findings suggest sliding through decision points can put a relationship at risk. While relationships present many crucial decision points, in this chapter, I’ll help you address two of them: defining the relationship and moving in together.

Two thirds of respondents between the ages of eighteen to twenty-nine agreed that couples who live together before marriage are more likely to have a successful marriage.

Married couples who move in together before they get married tend to be less satisfied and more likely to divorce than those who don’t. This association is known as the cohabitation effect.

If you move in together and things aren’t great, you’re more likely to stay in the relationship than if you each had your own space.

Ditchers make the same mistake with love. Thanks to the transition rule, they confuse falling in love with the state of being in love, and they expect the whole relationship to offer that initial excitement. But people adapt. Being in love is less intense than falling into it. Which, by the way, seems like a good thing! How could we get any work done with everyone walking around acting like the classic cartoon character Pepé Le Pew—smitten and speaking broken French?

Ditchers underestimate the opportunity cost of leaving, never learning how to be a good long-term partner.

Hitchers are also impacted by loss aversion. Behavioral economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman identified this phenomenon in a seminal paper. They explained that “losses loom larger than gains.”

We’re more terrified of the potential loss of our partner than intrigued by the potential gain of the person we could date instead.

But here’s the worst thing: You’re not alone in the car. Your partner is with you. If you’re planning on ending the relationship, every day you wait, you’re wasting their time, too. You should be especially sensitive if you’re dating a woman who is hoping to give birth to her own kids. You’re underestimating her opportunity cost of being with you. The longer you put off breaking up with her, the less time she has to find a new partner and build a family. The kindest thing is to give her a clear answer so she can move on and find someone else.

Romanticizers tend to expect a happily ever after and then struggle when issues inevitably arise. They think, If this person were really my soul mate, it wouldn’t be so hard. But all relationships go through periods of highs and lows, and you’re better prepared to handle the low points if you know they’re coming.

As my dad says, “I’m part of the welcoming committee, not the hiring committee.”

When you’re depleted, there’s not much left to give. Instead, ask less from your relationship—temporarily—while you sort out other parts of your life.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was trying to help others create lasting love while my own relationship faltered.

But that night, when I really reflected on my behavior, I realized how much I’d asked him to change for our relationship without being willing to put in the work myself.

In my quest to help others with their relationships, I’d forsaken my own.

It’s your right to break up with them, and it’s their right to have a strong emotional response to that action.

Understand that the breakup will likely derail the night, their weekend, and beyond, so choose your timing carefully.

Know that whatever you say is likely what they’ll fixate on after the breakup because of something called the narrative fallacy. Our brain tries to create a cause-and-effect story to explain the events we witness and experience, even when that story is false. Any breakup is likely a response to a whole number of situations and dynamics, but when you end things with someone and give a specific reason for doing it, they’ll obsess over that reason. Don’t plant that unhelpful seed in their mind.

We easily meet expectations set by others but struggle to uphold our own.

“often one of the most distressing events that an individual can experience in life.”

Fisher and her team found that a region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens lights up when we see a picture of a person we’re in love with. It’s the same part of the brain that’s activated when a drug addict thinks about getting a hit. It’s also the region of the brain affected during a breakup. Our brain undergoes the same experience during a breakup and a drug withdrawal. It’s no wonder we want to keep getting high on our ex’s supply. Might as well face it: You’re addicted to love.

According to Fisher, breakups have been found to increase our cortisol (stress hormone) levels, which then suppress our immune system and weaken our coping mechanisms. People may experience insomnia, intrusive thoughts, depression, anger, and debilitating anxiety. What’s surprising is that they also score lower on IQ tests and perform worse on complex tasks that require reasoning or logic skills. Heck, people going through breakups have been found to use drugs and commit crimes at higher rates.

our brain is hypersensitive to loss.

They are the death of your imagined future with your partner. You’re grieving the loss of what was, what no longer is, and what will never be. No wonder, thanks to loss aversion, we do so much to steer clear of them.

Remember, your brain is your friend, and it’s really quite good at helping you rationalize and get over things. It’s time to feed the beast! You can speed up the healing process by giving your brain what it’s craving: reasons why the breakup was actually for the best.

The authors explain that people who wait longer to get into a relationship often suffer from decreased self-esteem, while people who enter a new relationship quickly tend to be spared that self-confidence hit. Moving from one relationship to the next means they spend less time alone, questioning their value.

Though she’d met plenty of potentially great partners over the years, she’d self-sabotaged, going after the emotionally unavailable younger guys to prevent herself from getting into a real relationship and possibly getting hurt. She committed to making changes to break that habit. She started dating with different priorities and opened her eyes to Prom Date red flags. She gave guys her own age and older a chance. She video-chatted with a number of eligible suitors. Then she went for a walking date with the guy she liked most. After some more socially distanced hangs, they decided to give quarantining together a chance. Moving in with someone she barely knew was completely outside her comfort zone. But the world felt so upside down that she decided to try something new. They’re still happily cohabitating and are planning a road trip to visit each other’s families.