How to Know If You’ve Met The One
Do birds suddenly appear every time your beloved is near? Do stars fall from the sky every time they walk by? The Savvy Psychologist Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, shares 6 ways to know if you’ve met the love of your life.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
Listen
How to Know If You’ve Met The One
Listener Anna from Toronto wrote in and asked how she could determine whether the person she’s dating is the right match for her.
For millennia, we’ve partnered within our tribe, our village, or our neighborhood. If we were lucky, the number of eligible partners we had to choose from reached maybe a dozen. Fast forward to today, however, and we can connect with untold numbers of people with the right-swipe of a finger.
But choice can be a double-edged sword. It breeds the illusion that we can find our soulmate if we sort patiently and diligently enough. In turn, this leads to second-guessing, high-pressure first dates, and rampant perfectionism in pursuit of The One.
So what does a diligent mate search look like in the 21st century? And how do we know when we’ve found The One? Do birds suddenly appear every time they are near? Do stars fall from the sky every time they walk by?
The bad news: there’s no foolproof formula.
The good news: there are some rules of thumb to follow (though you can still find true love even if you break them all).
This week, here are 6 ways to find your match:
Tip #1: Like Pairs With Like
When looking for a mate, people are, shall we say, optimists. A study in the journal Science Advances examined heterosexual online daters across four major U.S. cities. They found that people have a general idea of how attractive they are, and from there, tend to punch up. The study found that both male and female mate seekers tended to contact profiles who were about 25% more attractive than themselves, and when doing so, strategically compensated by writing a longer message.
Despite all this optimism, in the end, couples tend to “match” on all sorts of variables, including attractiveness. This is a phenomenon called assortative mating and it’s the overall tendency for all animals, from poison dart frogs to black-headed gulls to humans, to pair like with like.
We humans often, but not always, pair up by age, education, social class, body height and size, and many other factors, including attractiveness.
There are, of course, many exceptions to this rule—ugly rock stars marrying supermodels is just the beginning—but in general, your perfect match will be exactly that—a match on many different variables.
Tip #2: Shared Values Set You Up for a Shared Life
Even more important than matching on physical and demographic stats, shared values set you up for the long haul. Again, exceptions abound, but agreeing on, for example, the importance of education, how you spend money, the place of religion in your lives, your political leanings and more can create a solid foundation for a future together. You don’t have to agree on everything, but connecting on the fundamentals means smoother sailing through the years.
Tip #3: Will They Cheat?
Infidelity is a dealbreaker for many relationships, and while there’s no crystal ball for cheaters, you can read your partner’s personality with some accuracy.
In personality research lingo, individuals low on conscientiousness, low on agreeableness, and high on openness are more susceptible to cheating. What does this mean exactly? People low in conscientiousness are careless, disorganized, and unreliable—they’re the ones who may or may not show up when they said they would. Folks low in agreeableness are unkind, distant, and uncooperative—they’re basically the opposite of kind and considerate. And those high in openness can be thrill seekers always looking for something new and different. Together, it’s a high-risk mix for cheating.
An even redder flag is a partner with traits from what’s called the Dark Triad—narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. These folks tend only to look out for number one and make lousy partners across the board. Avoid these schemers, liars, and manipulators at all costs.
Tip #4: Trauma Breeds Trauma
We’re often attracted to those who make us feel at home. But if home (whether family of origin or early formative experiences) mistreated us, exploited us, or otherwise made us feel like garbage, we’re likely to pick a partner who makes us feel that way, too. It feels familiar, and therefore right. It matches what we’ve been taught to expect from close relationships.
So, if you know your partner-picker is miscalibrated, don’t rely solely on your sense of attraction and chemistry when it comes to choosing a mate. Instead, pay close attention to how your potential partner treats you—look at their behavior over time, not just the thumpity-thump of your heart.
This is really hard when you’re the one involved, so get lots and lots of outside perspective and feedback from trusted friends and if applicable, your therapist. Get some distance by asking yourself if you’d approve if your potential partner treated a close friend the way they were treating you. If the answer is no, take some time to reflect and re-think.
Tip #5: Optimal Stopping Theory
Listener Anna writes that in her quest to find a good match, she can get bogged down in overanalyzing. She asks what the best strategy is to assess fit.
It turns out there is a strategy—a mathematical solution called the odds algorithm.
The math is over most of our heads, but whether you have several dozen options or several million, the rule says to first reject a fair chunk of the options, and then go with the first available option that is better than every other option rejected thus far.
Turns out you can use this rule of thumb in hiring staff, buying a house, and lots of other decisions, including finding a life partner. Essentially, it boils down to this: Don’t settle down too early—spend some time looking. But after you’ve gotten to know what’s out there, when you meet someone who’s a better match for you than anyone you’ve met thus far, it’s time to stop and commit.
Tip #6: When You Find “The One,” Commit!
In general, people prefer to make reversible decisions—like buying a sweater that can be returned or, germane to our topic, getting married with the option to divorce—rather than a more permanent decision. Makes sense, but a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people are often happier without the burden of choice. Why? Turns out people adapt to events more quickly when they cannot undo them. This may be why many arranged marriages work out just fine. Heck, it even worked for more than one of the reality TV couples on Married at First Sight.
So don’t pull up to your partner’s house with a U-Haul and a thought in the back of your mind that you can keep your options open. Instead, jump in with both feet and commit. Counterintuitively, you’ll likely be happier if there’s no easy way out.
All in all, while it would be nice to weigh all the options exhaustively, we just can’t sort through everyone on the planet. But thankfully, with input from your head, your heart, your values, and a dash of one particular mathematical algorithm, you won’t have to sort through 7 billion people in order to find The One.
Looking for love image courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.