The 9 Most Common Mistakes We Make When Choosing a Partner

Choosing a long-term partner may be the single most consequential decision any of us ever has to make. No wonder we can get a little scared on dates. If we get the choice right, we may enjoy supportiveness, cosiness and intimacy for the rest of our lives; if we get it wrong, our confidence, health, financial wherewithal and sanity will be on the line.

England’s greatest novelist, Jane Austen, spent her career writing almost exclusively about her characters’ quests to locate a suitable mate. As critics have pointed out, in the world outside her study, Britain was fighting a war of survival against Napoleonic France, but Austen never saw fit to mention the conflict even once, so busy was she telling us about who blushed on seeing whom at which party. One might smirk, but her priorities may have been correct. War is indeed a very serious matter; choosing a partner is properly monumental one. 

What then are some of the most weighty mistakes we make when attempting to find a lover?

1. Our Terror of Loneliness

Much of the reason for our unhappy romantic lives comes down to our dread of the single state. So terrified are we of our own company and of the persistent humiliations of the dating rigmarole, we become fatefully generous towards mediocre partners who may – over time – end up making us feel far lonelier and more miserable than if we were merely on our own. The single greatest guarantor of contented love is a capacity to endure one’s own company.

2. The Sunk Cost Fallacy

We stay because we have already been here for so long: because it’s already far too late, given that we’re 21, or 39 or 104. We think relentlessly of the 3 months, five years or two decades that we’ve already spent with a person, with all the hope implied – and thereby overlook that a short happy future is always worth more than a lengthy fractious past. We forget too that though people may occasionally change, they seem never to do so when one politely asks them to.

3. Muddled Assumptions of Better Alternatives

Of course they’re a bit awful, the question is whether one is dealing with an especially obtuse sort or just another member of our collectively maddening species. We’re always choosing from a pool, and we need – to a maximal extent – to know what other kinds of creatures swim in it. Our level of calm years from now is going to depend on having built up – through experience – a fair and robust sense of what an acceptable degree of frustration might be. Anyone can find someone annoying; the true skill is to have determined the relative inevitability of their vexatiousness, to know how to distinguish hysterical misery from normal unavoidable unhappiness.

4. A Hatred of Love

We may spend a great many years pushing away anyone with the gall to try to love us. Our repulsion tends to have its roots in difficult childhoods in which we built up an association between intimacy on the one hand and pain on the other; between closeness and suffering. We now suspect that anyone who is sweet must be deluded for identifying in us a lovability that we don’t recognise in ourselves. Happy love may be what we crave; it isn’t necessarily what we can remotely tolerate. 

5. The Appeal of Madness

It can take a long time to develop immunity to the appeal of those who blow hot and cold, hate themselves, refuse our affection, deceive us and fall into rages and despair late at night. We may be deep into middle age before we cotton onto the extraordinary merits and subtle exoticism of sane reliable ‘boring’ people, who trust others, go to therapy, garden, like themselves and love their parents.

6. The Tragedies of Defensiveness

It’s the character trait that single handedly dooms more relationships than any other – and means that when one gently raises a complaint against a partner, they reply that this isn’t a good time, that it’s one’s own fault, that there is in fact no problem, that one is being mean and that this is all too much. It’s a blessed day when one lands on a human who, thanks to the love of early caregivers, utters the magical words: ‘How interesting, I hear you… You might have a point… Let me have a think about what you’re saying…’

7. Underestimating the Cumulative Impact of Character Flaws

We tell ourselves that it’s only a little thing, just a small tendency in them to do x or y or z. Then again, a pebble is also only a very small thing but if we have one in our shoe and we are running a marathon, after a mile our foot will be soaked in blood. 

8. Underestimating Physical Attraction

It’s a criterion that clever people (like us) are especially prone to neglecting. Surely sexual appeal shouldn’t detain us for too long when choosing a mate? Surely there are more important things to think at length about than who might be submissive and who dominant? But this is to overlook how many arguments are at heart about a resentment over absent sex and conversely how much one can forgive a mate after a satisfying twenty minutes together. Given that sex is (unlike good conversation or advice) typically the only thing that we’re not legitimately allowed to seek outside a couple, we should make sure that the kind we are having in it is uncommonly satisfying. 

9. Perfectionism

Our chances of making a good enough choice increase the more we recognise the impossibility of making a perfect one. Our marriages improve as we concede that we will – naturally – inevitably marry slightly the wrong person – but only because there is no such thing as the fully ‘right’ sort. Gods can marry paragons; we are fated to have to cope with just another demented sweet silly fool much like us. The most contented marriages rest on a bed of consoling, forgiving, gentle laughter-filled pessimism.