marry without total admiration and rapture, you will not have enough passion to fuse you together in the early days, and you will split apart when times get hard. Moreover, settling is immoral because there is another person involved. The other person is not going to want to be the fourth best option in your life. Are you going into the relationship telling the person that you’re “settling” in being with them? If you’re honest and tell him that, you’re introducing a fatal inequality into your relationship right away. If you don’t tell him that, you are lying to the person you are supposedly closest to in the whole world. Settling seems realistic, but only a love built on rapturous devotion is pragmatic in the end.
The rest of the questions are about the other person and the relationship itself. The most important consideration is this: Marriage is a fifty-year conversation. The most important factor in when you think about marrying someone is, Would I enjoy talking with this person for the rest of my life?
If the answer to that question is yes, there are three lenses that people apply when making the rest of the marriage decision: the psychological lens, the emotional lens, and the moral lens.
The first is the psychological lens. Characters in Jane Austen and George Eliot novels spend a lot of time evaluating each other’s temperament, or what we call personality traits. There’s a good reason for that. Personality traits are pretty steady across adulthood. As Ty Tashiro puts it in The Science of Happily After, “If you choose some dreamy partner who is bright, funny, self-confident, kind and good-looking, and loves his or her mother, then the good news is that when you reassess your romantic situation after twenty-five years of marriage, that partner, compared to others in your same age cohort, will probably still be bright, funny, self-confident, kind and good-looking, and a good son or daughter.”
So how do you discern a person’s permanent personality traits? In 1938, the researcher Lewis Terman argued that you should look at a person’s relational background. He ranked the things to look for:
Superior happiness of parents
Childhood happiness
Lack of conflict with mother
Home discipline that was firm, not harsh
Strong attachment to mother
Strong attachment to father
Lack of conflict with father
Parental frankness about matters of sex
Infrequency and mildness of childhood punishment
Premarital attitude toward sex that was free from disgust or aversion
Others say the most telling thing to look for is attachment style. People who were securely attached to one caregiver as early as eighteen months (about 60 percent of all people) have a model in their heads for how to build and maintain secure relationships. When such people are in the presence of someone they love, their heart rate declines and their respiration slows. They relax because it feels normal to them.
People who experienced anxious attachment patterns when they were infants are more likely to have trouble relaxing when they are in loving relationships. The model in their head tells them that the person they love is about to leave. Their heart rates and respiratory patterns speed up. People who had avoidant attachment patterns when they were young (they sent signals to their caregivers, but nothing came back), have preemptively shut down. Their model says, If I don’t get close then the nonresponse won’t hurt.
According to one authoritative longitudinal study, 90 percent of securely attached people marry, and of those 21 percent get divorced. Seventy percent of avoidantly attached people marry, and of those 50 percent get divorced. For people with anxious attachments, the divorce rates are even higher.
You’d think that everybody would try to marry securely attached people. But that’s not how it works out. People disproportionately marry people with their own attachment style. Secure with secure, avoidant with avoidant, and anxious with anxious. Early childhood attachment patterns are not destiny; people can change, but if you see the markers of avoidant or anxious attachment styles in your partner, it’s worth making a mental note.
Still others say that the best way to understand another person’s psychology is by applying the Big Five personality traits matrix. The Big Five are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. When it comes to a relationship partner, the last two traits are the most important. Basically, Ty Tashiro argues, you want to seek agreeableness and avoid neuroticism.
Agreeableness—being a nice guy—doesn’t sound like the sexiest or most romantic possible trait. The agreeable person is