How to Choose
a Partner
Susan Quilliam
MACMILLAN
For Michael and Silvano. I could not wish for better friends.
Contents
1. Understanding
2. Being Ready
3. Looking Back
4. Not Choosing
5. Focussing
6. Connecting
7. Being in Love
8. Knowing
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Picture Acknowledgements
1. Understanding
When you make a choice, you change the future.
(DEEPAK CHOPRA)
Choosing a romantic partner is one of contemporary life’s biggest adventures. Embark on the quest and we may meet fascinating people as well as some who make us crazy; we may rise to emotional heights as well as sinking into fury, fear and depression; we may lose direction completely before at last we find our way to love.
The real challenge is that we grow. Partner choice is a self-development journey, driving us to learn more about ourselves, about other people, about life and the way we want to live it. Take all that on board and we start to realize just how big an adventure choosing a partner is.
What we may not realize is just how much bigger and more difficult that adventure is now more than ever before in history. For up to now, humankind has been sensible about partner choice. Of course lust and romance have had much to do with it – especially around affairs, liaisons or simple flings. But for serious lifetime pairing, people have historically leaned away from the romantic and towards the pragmatic. The rich have typically chosen a partner for honour, for fortune, for political expediency and to preserve the hereditary line. The less rich – with less to protect – have had more leeway to let hearts rule heads, but have still needed to guarantee financial security, secure practical support and bear children to provide for later years.
The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, a celebration of uber-traditional marriage with one main aim – an heir.
Even in the glorious Age of Chivalry, when a knight’s love for his lady was a key life aim, no one ever suggested that romance should lead to commitment; in the Court of King Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere’s real crime was not so much in adoring each other as in trying to make their adoration the basis for a 24/7 relationship. As historian Stephanie Coontz points out in Marriage, a History, while people have always enjoyed a love story, up until very recently ‘our ancestors didn’t live in one’.
An emotional revolution
Fast forward to the twentieth century and romance became an imperative. Claire Langhamer, in her book The English in Love, explains that this emotional revolution had been simmering for a while, but was fully triggered into being by many and varied social changes – though who knows which of these was cause and which effect. The introduction of the contraceptive Pill making partnerships less focussed on procreation and more on emotional connection? Women becoming more educated, more highly paid and therefore more able to exit loveless marriages? The slaughter of two World Wars encouraging us to seize the day and prioritize short-term intensity over long-term commitment? The rise of social liberalization, mass education, global communication? The fall in religious belief, the rise of individual entitlement, the passing of divorce laws?
Whatever the reasons, somewhere around the mid years of the last century, partnership became universally and inextricably linked with love. And that has tossed all the jigsaw-puzzle pieces into the air. For the first time, passion – sexual and emotional – has become the primary benchmark for relationship success. Think of the famous opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ Then compare that with the 1949 pronouncement by Rev. Herbert Gray, chair of the National Marriage Guidance Council, that ‘the only sufficient reason for marrying is that you . . . love somebody . . .’ Where matrimonial ads in the mid-1900s – when my own mother was making her partnership decisions – marketed prospective mates on their cleanliness, honesty and weekly wage, our contemporary equivalent, online dating sites, now trumpet the glories of ‘Chemistry’, ‘Encounters’ and being ‘Soulmates’.
Reality hits
All of which sounds enticing. But the reality’s more problematic. For we now approach partner choice with bigger expectations, deeper confusion and heavier pressure than ever before. Blending love into the relationship mix may have promised fulfilment but it’s created huge challenges.
The first issue is that we need to make more choices more often. Centre-staging love means we’re likely to want to walk away from a relationship if the romance dies, while less insistence on marriage plus more liberal divorce laws means we can do so far more easily. The result is that we now have not just one window of partner choice at biological maturity – with an additional window if a spouse dies – but on average five windows through a lifetime. We may choose in our teens for first love, in our twenties for first commitment, in our thirties for parenting partnership, in our forties for post-divorce companionship, with a final choice for relationship support to take us through to death. All that plus any additional liaisons.
Now set this increased need against decreased opportunity. We meet fewer partners because we are more globally mobile; as never before we move house, change jobs, relocate to new countries. We have less chance to create partnerships because we work long hours – then travel home, in different directions, to socially isolated conurbations. Plus, we’re less resourced to find and choose a partner because we’re less supported; we take the practical and emotional burden on our individual shoulders far more than when we only had to decide between marrying the boy/girl next door or the one further up the street. The final outcome of this blend of more demand and less supply? Meeting a mate has rarely been so challenging.
Happy endings?
And rarely so important. As never before, loving coupledom is now regarded as the key task of the human lifetime, and even more vital because we live in a fractured and isolated society. Cue that wise verse in Genesis where God says ‘it is not good for man to be alone’.