Finding Your Life Partner is Hard with Consequences
Context: I never think about the consequences of dating someone when I first meet them. I am so captivated by the possibilities and attraction that the consequences which are so obvious after a breakup are completely invisible during the honeymoon phase. It is a form of being confidently wrong and it hurts. Hopefully writing about it will help make it fresh in my brain next time I am poised to fall into this trap. As such I am writing it from a pessimistic viewpoint and assuming the worst (but I think most likely) outcome.
Selecting someone is hard...
- You have to listen to the quietest part of yourself (your authentic voice) while the loudest part of yourself is full tilt (sex).
- You are bad at it and gaining experience comes only through:
- making yourself vulnerable to someone who will hurt you
- caring deeply about someone who you will hurt
- Naturally, the person will do their best to hide their default mode. You will spend months to get to know the more relevant-to-a-life-partner version of them
- Any expectations you unknowingly create based on their initially presented ideal self turn into disappointments
- Any surface level trait you like in your current partner will be bested by the people you meet while you try to look for the deeper level traits and these new people will seemingly not have the problems you are currently working to see if you can manage. 1
- The doubts you have initially have to be hidden from your partner. If the feelings of being disingenuous become too much and you share how you actually feel (however carefully) they will get hurt, blame it on you, and need space. It is 100% or 0.
...and breaking up has consequences.
- You will never be able to be close with someone you thought would be an epic friend
- Any of their friends, which are a concentration of compatible people, are now unavailable to you as friends or partners
- Your friends have to navigate their friendship with you and their attraction to them
- You will experience what it is like to have a dimension of a relationship be the best it will ever be for you 2. You will need to gracefully accept the lack of this dimension in your future life partner.
- The "one that got away" could reach out at any time, at any stage of cultivating a relationship with your life partner 3. The time investment with the "good enough" person is now impossibly compared with the spark of the "what could be" person.
So yeah, I need to pause to appreciate the difficulty and be mindful of the consequences.
You have to walk past the outdoor pool with sexy women in bikinis to crawl through a tunnel and continue the uncomfortable manual labor of digging deeper. Only occasionally does this yield a gem. If at any time you leave to jump in the pool the tunnel collapses and you have to start over.↩
You will need to optimize for every dimension to be "good enough" because you are "downside sensitive". That is, 1 bad aspect of the person outweighs any number of exceptional ones. However, you are dating them in the first place because of you noticing an exceptional trait. Therefore, your past partners will each show you a dimension of a relationship that is better than you will ever get to experience again. So far I have experienced: the best physical intimacy I will ever have, the most emotionally intuitive person, the most athletic, and the most ambitious. I will now need to accept the lack of the levels of each of these in the next person I am going to date. What will get me to date them is a different trait they are exceptional in which will likely only add to the list further perpetuating the problem.↩
You will need to decide between the time you spent developing a relationship with someone who is great but had a weaker initial spark with. This current person has shown you their less savory sides and you think you can make it work. You can't figure out what the less savory sides are of the one that got away without irreparably damaging what you have built with your current best attempt for a life partner.↩