What often stops us from using the love funnel effectively is a kind of fear of focussing: a nervousness about elimination, a wariness of being choosy, a belief that we shouldn’t – for which read ‘aren’t entitled to’ – dismiss partners who mismatch, or partnership options which don’t appeal. ‘I need to spread the net wide or I won’t find anyone’. . . ‘If I set the bar too high no one will want me’. . . ‘I can’t say no to her/him, they’ll feel so rejected’. This panic is totally understandable if we’ve had – as we all have – past heartbreak. But it’s nevertheless misguided; we do need to focus on what we want rather than going with the flow. I’m not a believer in ‘The One’, but unless we start saying no to those who aren’t right for us, we won’t get anywhere near those who are.
If you suspect that fear of focussing is holding you back, then try this. Imagine yourself sitting somewhere you feel most comfortable, and knowing that your ‘right for you’ partner is nearby. You’re happy because he or she is there, you know that they care for you and you for them and you allow yourself to want them and to want the relationship you have with them. (If you’re tempted into caveats or qualifications of the ‘nobody loves me’ or ‘that’ll never happen’ kind, set these aside for the moment.) Now imagine your partner arrives. Imagine seeing them, hearing their voice as they speak to you, feeling their touch as they reach out for you. Allow yourself to experience their attention fully and know that you deserve that attention.
The point of this exercise is not to imagine what a future partner might actually be like. It’s to have a mental experience of wanting that partner, feeling entitled to want them and being wanted in return. As explained at the very start of this book, partner choice is a quest, and as with all quests it’s good to have a bit of feisty courage – courage to believe in yourself, courage to believe there are partners out there you can choose, courage to believe that there are partners out there who will choose you. Given that belief, you’ll find it much easier to keep setting aside those you don’t want and keep heading towards those you do.
Specifying
So how do we begin? How do we create our personal love funnel? The answer is to get more specific. Specificity clears the mind, orders the thinking, makes us feel in control, helps us understand what we’re doing. We are right to believe that specifying will help us towards a result, even in an area as unpredictable as partner choice.
The historical wheel has come full circle here. When marriage decisions were made on measurable criteria – age, status, earnings, childbearing potential – specifying was the way to narrow the field. But when romance left its place in the wings and took centre stage, we sniffed at being too precise, because we wanted to let our emotions rule – if we loved each other, surely the details were irrelevant. Now things are coming back into balance. Much of the current coverage of partner choice presents its lessons in the form of specified lists – as seen on every online dating site, in many relationship-advice articles, and via the relationships section on Amazon. The current crop of urban tales featuring heroes/heroines who found their princess/prince through detailed specification inspire us not only because we too want to magically conjure up our own fairy-tale partners, but also because we recognize that specifying is necessary to the process.
Of course we shouldn’t over-specify. It’s not only that, life being what it is, we can’t have everything we want. It’s also that many of the details of what we want will be irrelevant to our goal of a good relationship. It may matter hugely that a partner shares our love of animals, but if they do love animals – or if we fall for them regardless – it likely won’t matter at all that they have blue eyes rather than brown. Proof of this is courtesy of another study by Professor Eli Finkel, in which he asked speed daters their partner criteria just before the event; said daters then completely ignored their own benchmarks when they started mingling only minutes later. However convinced we are that we need a partner who’s extravert/introvert, dark/blonde, big/small, if we find the right person, size won’t matter.
Even so, once our partner pool is big enough, specifying is the perfect starting point. It keeps us on logical track. It boundaries the challenge and keeps it doable. It engages our minds for a task which can otherwise all too easily become over-influenced by our hearts and other more lustful parts of our anatomy. Perhaps unexpectedly, specifying also opens the door to deeper realizations. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, whose bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow recently alerted us to the subtleties of decision-making – or in other words, choice – points out that specifying doesn’t just call on logic but also on a more instinctive awareness. He believes that we ‘improve . . . intuition by making a list then sleeping on it.’ When we create a partner specification, we will often mysteriously find ourselves exploring much wider issues, not just about surface criteria but also about what we need from a partner on a deeper level, and how to instinctively recognize that when it arrives.
Your wish-list
Specifying is the perfect starting point – and the right first step. Our assumption, offline as well as on, is that we should start with what we ourselves are ‘selling’ and only then consider what we want to ‘buy’ from a partner. But that’s not only the wrong metaphor – partnership is not about trading but about relating – it’s also the wrong way round. To attract someone, we first need to know what kind of someone to attract. We can’t set the GPS effectively until we know the destination.
If you’ve already made a wish-list of the specifics you want in a partner, take this opportunity to revisit it. If you haven’t already made a list, here’s your opportunity. Write down all the elements which for you headline your ideal mate. Gender, age, appearance, cultural background, religious belief, lifestyle, career, earnings, leisure patterns, hobbies, interests, location – if you run out of categories, most online dating sites include an extensive tick-box list. Avoid vague, avoid abstract – the idea is to get a detailed, defined, quantifiable starter guide. Then prioritize in order of importance; as I’ve said, you can’t have everything, so your top five at least need to be the things you couldn’t live without.
Deal-breakers
Next, list the things you couldn’t live with, your deal-breakers. This part of the process aims to make sure we don’t find ourselves involved with (worse, married to) someone utterly unsuitable; it’s the bottom line which helps us less to find The One – for there are many Ones – as to make sure that The Totally Wrong One doesn’t slip under our guard because they are tempting. Here are four classic deal-breakers, and that’s about the number to aim for – more, and you’re probably drawing the net too tight.
• Different and uncomplimentary sexual leanings – such as a potential partner’s being gay whereas you need straight, or vice versa
• Mismatched relationship aims – such as their wanting marriage where you want casual, or vice versa