What common mistakes do people make when choosing a

life partner?
To a frustrated single person, life can often feel like this:

And at first glance, research seems to back this up,

suggesting that married people are on average happier than
single people and much happier than divorced people. But a
closer analysis reveals that if you split up “married people”
into two groups based on marriage quality, “people in self-
assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less
happy than unmarried people, and people in self-assessed
good marriages are even more happy than the literature
reports.”

In other words, here’s what’s happening in reality:

Dissatisfied single people should actually consider

themselves in a neutral, fairly hopeful position, compared to
what their situation could be. A single person who would like
to find a great relationship is one step away from it, with
their to-do list reading, “1) Find a great relationship.”
People in unhappy relationships, on the other hand, are
three leaps away, with a to-do list of “1) Go through a soul-
crushing break-up. 2) Emotionally recover. 3) Find a great
relationship.” Not as bad when you look at it that way,
right?

All the research on how vastly happiness varies between

happy and unhappy marriages makes perfect sense, of
course. It’s your life partner.

Thinking about how overwhelmingly important it is to pick

the right life partner is like thinking about how huge the
universe really is or how terrifying death really is—it’s too
intense to internalize the reality of it, so we just don’t think
about it that hard and remain in slight denial about the
magnitude of the situation.

But unlike death and the universe’s size, picking a life

partner is fully in your control, so it’s critical to make
yourself entirely clear on how big a deal the decision really is
and to thoroughly analyze the most important factors in
making it.
So how big a deal is it?

Well, start by subtracting your age from 90. If you live a

long life, that’s about the number of years you’re going to
spend with your current or future life partner, give or take a
few.

(Sure, people get divorced, but you don’t think you will. A
recent study shows that 86% of young people assume their
current or future marriage will be forever, and I doubt older
people feel much differently. So we’ll proceed under that
assumption.)

And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of

things, including your parenting partner and someone who
will deeply influence your children, your eating companion
for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100
vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend,
your career therapist, and someone whose day you’ll hear
about 18,000 times.

Intense shit.
So given that this is by far the most important thing in life to
get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart,
otherwise-logical people end up choosing a life partnership
that leaves them dissatisfied and unhappy?

Well as it turns out, there are a bunch of factors working

against us: