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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Logan Ury
Read between
June 28 - July 30, 2023
Intentional Love asks you to view your love life as a series of choices rather than accidents.
Late at night, our faces lit by the blue glow of our smartphones, we wonder, Who am I? and What am I doing with my life? The dark side of all this freedom and endless choice is the crippling fear that we’ll screw up our lifelong pursuit of happiness.
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’ve gotten hooked on this feeling of certainty, and we crave it in our romantic lives. But when it comes to relationships, that kind of assurance doesn’t exist. There is no “right answer” to questions like Who should I be with? and How much should I compromise? and Will they ever change?
We all want to build lasting and fulfilling partnerships, but it’s harder to do that when you lack relationship role models.
It can feel like our entire lives hinge on the one major decision of whom to marry. This is especially true for women, who face more time pressure to pick a spouse if they want to have children by a certain age.
It’s time to realize that the package this person comes in might be different from what you were expecting. Maybe this person is shorter or taller or rounder or slimmer or darker or lighter or hairier or smoother than you expected. That very narrow view of this person’s looks holds you back from seeing the possibilities in front of you. If you’re not perfect, why should this person be?
The hard part is remembering why you love someone during all the logistical, financial, emotional, and spiritual challenges life throws at you.
American economist, political scientist, and cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon first described this personality profile in a 1956 paper. According to Simon, Maximizers are a special type of perfectionist. They’re compelled to explore every possible option before they feel like they can choose. Yet this compulsion becomes daunting, and ultimately unfeasible, when they face a vast number of possibilities. 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
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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.
the quality of your choice and how you feel about it.
If it’s happiness you’re after, it’s the subjective experience, not the objective result, that really matters.
You can’t go out with every eligible single in your city, let alone the whole world. If you hope to get married or commit to a long-term relationship, eventually, you’ll need to make a decision with the information you have.
Once we commit to something, our brain helps us rationalize why it was the right choice. Rationalization is our ability to convince ourselves we did the right thing.
we’re less committed to choices we think we can reverse, and commitment is crucial for happiness.
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.
Try to date secure partners. The ones who text when they say they will. Who let you know what’s on their mind. Who don’t play games and avoid or even de-escalate drama.
“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.
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.
‘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.’”
Dan Ariely wrote: “Human beings adjust behavior based on the metrics they’re held against. Anything you measure will impel a person to optimize his score on that metric.
evaluability: The easier it is to compare certain traits, the more important those traits seem.
Most of us have no idea what kind of partner will fulfill us long term.
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, in part because of choice overload.
Ghosting makes “ghosters” feel worse than if they’d been up front with their feelings.
Remember, losses loom larger than gains. Because of loss aversion, we experience twice as much psychological pain from losing that $100 as we experience pleasure from gaining $100.
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.
