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To put it in terms that might be more familiar around here, obsessing over finding the right partner is like believing that a successful startup is mostly about finding the right idea. (And from there, it will just work out on its own...) Sure, some ideas are more likely to work out a priori, but your success is going to be dramatically influenced by the amount of work you're willing to put into it, your willingness to learn, change, and grow along the way. I'm inclined to believe that there are tons of people with whom most of us could be compatible, and each would open onto a different future and a different version of you. If you want a long-term partner, choose someone who feels promising, bring all you've got--intellect, emotions, empathy, humility--to the relationship, and stick with it.

This is a great point. I would recommend this video by the school of life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltM5qYn25w. It basically delves a little into why our ideas or romance and love are perhaps not the best way to look at these things.

and Alain de Botton's other videos under his own name are generally very good too

Totally agreed. I find the notion of the so-called "soul-mates" a bit absurd. People behave differently when around other people, which means they can adapt to others. Being compatible with each other is a quality which resolves many issues.

I remember a few years ago, I read somewhere that the best girl you should marry is the one who if she were a guy, she'd be your "best friend".

Yes! It is all about the amount of effort and commitment that the parties (plural) are willing to put into it.

Bear in mind that each part of the married couple will have decades of their own personal evolution occurring underneath the current of regular life. Opinions, beliefs, or attitudes that are strongly held at the time of marriage will change. Even if you meet the Perfect Mate (TM), no one stays static for long.

Marriage, like all family living, requires a great deal of mutual toleration and patience, and a considerable amount of individual flexibility and adaptation.

The Perfect Couple will fall apart in short order if they are not willing to dedicate serious effort to their relationship on a perpetual basis. Marital success has little to do with the starting material.

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For these reasons among others, I like the cultural ideal of arranged marriages. They make it clear that marriage is about the commitment itself more than it's about the personality on either side of the equation.

I also believe that most of the parents or grandparents in a position to make the arrangements would have better character judgment than the much-younger people trying to select a good spousal candidate on their own (as above, "good spousal candidate" is someone eager and happy to work for a strong marriage).

In some sense, it is irresponsible of the older and wiser generations to offload this duty into the hands of those who have great difficulty wielding it. And while I don't believe these arrangements should be compulsory, I think we'd all be better off if this was the common practice.

In spite of what religious leaders (career term bureaucrats who actually don't know any better at all) may tell us, that's hardly the way to find maximum fulfillment in relationships. "Cultural harmony" aside. Lot of quite desperation and Prozac eating. And that's no way to go through life. Maybe being a homeless junkie is slightly worse. Maybe. Ya, man and women are together for sake of kids. Miserable and crazy. Which.. produces bad effects on kids. Probably more than at peace separated parents in fulfilled relationships. Like I say, God isn't talking at all to those old men. Nor are they wise. They are mostly full of bias and baloney.

The idea of arranged marriages is abhorrent, very close to slavery in denying individual worth and choice.

But ideally there should be some flexibility and commitment, particularly if children are involved, yes.

How to find your ideal mate for lots of men? She'll have me!

>In spite of what religious leaders (career term bureaucrats who actually don't know any better at all) may tell us, that's hardly the way to find maximum fulfillment in relationships. [...] Like I say, God isn't talking at all to those old men. Nor are they wise. They are mostly full of bias and baloney.

I don't know what you're talking about. I said nothing about religion, and this whole paragraph is all over the map. I doubt that very many couplings, including obviously bad ones, result in desperation nearing that of "a homeless junkie" as a virtue of themselves.

>The idea of arranged marriages is abhorrent, very close to slavery in denying individual worth and choice.

I disagree. Please note I said the arrangement should not be compulsory. We have many social obligations that are enforced culturally (at this point, marriage itself could almost be considered among these); such customs can be flaunted at will, but there is social pressure not to do so.

Progenitors are strongly motivated to make good choices on behalf of their offspring because their offspring's interest is simultaneously their own self-interest. Parents and grandparents are much more experienced than your average 20-something and generally much better equipped to make reasonable choices in mate selection, themselves typically having had some experience in the matter.

>How to find your ideal mate for lots of men? She'll have me!

I agree, and how does this not support what I'm saying?

It's a variation of the travellers curse, where the more places you visit the less satisfied you will be with settling in any one place.

That happens because you find new, positive qualities in each place, and no place will ever have them all. In fact, over time any place will have proportionally fewer of the positive qualities you've found, and everywhere becomes less appealing the further you travel.

Nice analogy. I'm thinking exactly same. More partners you have, more difficult it will be to stick with one.

On the other hand there are measurable differences in places and people. You _could_ just stay where you were raised or you could move somewhere with better career prospects, less crime, etc.

Similarly, I've now been in a relationship with ~6 people, by my late 20s. I don't want to wait until I'm 37 to settle on a life-partner, but I'm sure glad I didn't try to settle in my early 20s.

Each relationship has taught me more about my self and my needs and also given me perspective on what kinds of people are out there and how they work with me. There are some flaws that I might have thought were just part of life and I'd just have to put up with, until I dated other women who didn't have those flaws. Sure no one is perfect, but some flaws are more compatible or more destructive to a relationship than others.

Just my 2cents.

Re: #2 - you are also far more malleabele in your 20s.

Perfect matches are perfect because people change, yield and adjust to each other's quirks. The older you are the less flex there is. It's really quite simple.

This also related to #1 - a prerequisite for making a good match is the willigness to change. However a large pool of choices entices one to search a bit more for a match that requires less change, making it hard/er to try and commit to what might be already in place.

> listen to what people in NYC say about the dating scene there

I live in NYC and think the dating scene here is fantastic, at least for someone in their 20s. There's lots of opportunity to meet interesting people and have fun together. This is going to sound silly, but one of my strongest reasons for preferring NYC to SF is the better dating scene.

There's lots of opportunity to meet people, but I think the point is do those people want to settle down? Or do they want to keep meeting more interesting people? When people want a good dating scene they don't want to keep dating - they want successful dating, meaning a relationship.

That... really depends who you ask.

Well the context of this discussion is marriage, so I was meaning people looking for that. Is the dating scene ideal for that.

Sure, I agree that if your goal is to get married and settle down quickly then NYC might not be ideal.

That certainly doesn't mean everyone finds the NYC dating scene bad. Plenty of people are at a stage in life where their preference is for shorter term relationships and I don't see anything wrong with that.

So "Sex in the city" is actually good portrait of life and relationships in NYC?

1. Is also because people want to have ego stroked and sex all the time. If you have tons of potential mates but you just only want to email with them for 2-3 months, and not sappy emails, but just emailing to get to know eachother, then you weed out most of that. All the 'fast ones' are completely gone by that time and you are left with something that could be 'real'. You never know, but this advice got a lot of people permanently together when we owned a dating site where we didn't want focus on one night stands. Which ofcourse happened a lot (and worse), but this seems to work effectively if both sides can withstand the usual 'ah, ok, well here's my number, see ya in 10' after a few texts. As that usually ends in not all that much; fine if that was what you were going for.

> Look at a city with a massive population of eligible young people, like say NYC.. and then listen to what people in NYC say about the dating scene there. It's not pretty. Having such a huge pool of potential mates discourages people from committing. In other words, it makes it harder to find a long term mate, and it makes you less satisfied with whoever you're seeing.

I disagree, this just means you are not optimizing properly. You should optimize based on desired characteristics. It is a binary search. Based on my, abet fairly limited set of anecdotal evidence ( including my own ), it works very well.

Are you married, or in a long-term partnership?

14 years. We would have been married but it would create certain extra costs and difficulties that we can avoid by not being married.

>> I have always hated the notion that having a happy marriage is about filtering through many candidates to find the one perfect partner.

Dating is no machine learning where you need a large sample to get it right. It is rather taking the looking glass focussing on what fits for you.

Satisficing, not optimizing. gotcha! ;)

Sounds a bit like "The Paradox of Choice".

That's what it is, and people are greedier still thanks to the notion of perfect partners.

People should just follow math and the optimal marriage problem, if they want to get married. This probably operates in phases as well in the event you do get divorced. Early adulthood, middle age, later. This may skew in NYC due to older NYC men when they want to marry and have kids can find a younger women.

To qualify this, only if you have break ups.

What does getting married, have to do with sharing your early adulthood with a person?

Does this really have to be explained?

Persumably you want to get married because you want to share your life with somebody else. If you don't start sharing until you're 40, you've already missed the opportunity to share what are almost certainly the most transformative and significant years of your life. Of course this doesn't mean a later marriage can't be happy and successful too... but it does involve missing out on things that some people care a lot about.

I can’t share my life with someone, and not be married?

The hell are you talking about

I'm trying to understand what the act of being married, has to do with sharing your life with someone at any age. You can't be with someone, share you life together, and not be married?

You don't seem to understand the difference between a proposition and its converse.

"If a person wants to get married, s/he wants to share his/her life with someone" is (more or less) true, and is the premise everyone is working under.

The converse of that proposition is "If a person wants to share his/her life with someone, s/he wants to get married." That is what you for some reason appear to believe is the premise we are working under. But it's not.

I don't think he is trying to state the converse of your original quote. Seems clear all he is saying is that you can share your life with someone regardless of being married. You can live with a boyfriend/girlfriend and experience sharing life all the same without the religious or legal institution of marriage. Unless the assertion is that things like filing taxes together somehow prevent this

This is an intentionally obtuse perspective. Marriage is a significant social institution in a way that a mere interpersonal commitment can never be, because marriage is a commitment with a third entity: the community at large.

The social structure accepts and enforces the marital union, providing significant legal protection to itself, the children, and the married partners.

This grants a solid staying power, borne of the subconscious knowledge that no party can really "just leave" and be done with it. This staying power should not be underestimated; it is effective and real regardless of how little one believes they will need to rely on it.

I certainly get that marriage has a social and legal structure which makes it more difficult to split. I just don't think it is paramount to sharing your life with someone. I am married but lived with my wife for 8 years prior and can say, personally, it made no difference in my feeling or commitment for her. During that time I certainly felt I was sharing my life with someone.

In many cultures, as soon as you're living like boyfriend/girlfriend together in the same building for more than 3 months, you're considered married unless you go out of your way to actively deny it.

In the US/UK, you don't have to preemptively deny it, but if people begin to assume you're married and you don't correct them... then you're married under common-law.

I have a dear friend who has been 'dating' his girlfriend for almost twenty years. Their eldest child is 14, and they own a home together. As far as sharing their lives together, they've done it without being married legally---but in the eyes of all their friends and their kids? Oh those two are so married.

In many places you cannot. You would be considered married by common law. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage

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