Everyone’s first piece of advice for finding a compatible person to date is to find someone with a lot of similarities. But for a lasting, healthy relationship, being aligned is a bit more complex. You need to be similar beyond liking the same T.V. shows or being from the same small town in Tennessee. Duh.
The first, most simple part of alignment, is your purpose for dating. In middle school and high school, teenagers start dating for the first time. Obviously these relationships are very immature, but they can actually be really valuable because they allow individuals to learn about themselves and what they like in another person in a very low-stakes environment. Some people might think they are finding their life-long partner in high school, but only 2% of marriages started with a high school relationship, with higher than average divorce rates.1 Sorry Hollywood.
In post-high school, college, and into our twenties, many people begin to get more serious about their relationships, but are still frequently learning about successful dating or still just having fun. This can lead to someone who is serious about finding a spouse dating someone who is just looking to mess around, which, shockingly, tends to end poorly, although probably just for one of them.
It seems like the laws of attraction require a few hilarious dating stories to really find a keeper
In my experience, when people get too serious too quickly, they miss out on a lot of this learning about themselves and about what they want their relationship to look like for the next 50 or so years. Years later, they discover that their interests have drifted significantly away from each other, which results in much higher divorce rates for couples who marry in their late teens or early twenties.
To me, the logical conclusion is that our teens and early twenties, dating should be focused on developing ourselves as an individual and on learning how to really care about another person. As discussed in all the dating advice out there, you should not only be attracted to them physically or intellectually, but compatible with them (more on this later) and interested in them as an entire person.
When you do start a more serious dating relationship, it is crucial to be on the same page with your significant other about what the goal of your relationship is. If you are both just looking to have fun? Great. If you both want to get serious and think about finding a spouse? Awesome. But if one of you is much more serious than the other, you are almost certainly mixing up a bowl of emotional hurt.
Once you are in a relationship where you both are marriage-focused, it is time to talk about what marriage looks like for both of you. Not because you need to be planning your marriage already, but because marriage is never going to work if you don’t have similar ideas of what marriage is.
As marital freedom increases in society, people have begun to favor a wider variety of marriage types. Some partners work as a support network for each other and someone to have kids with, but still spend most of their time pursuing their individual passions rather than spending most of their time on things together. Other couples aim to do almost everything together and share every detail of their life with the other. Again, your preferences will likely surface quickly while dating, but sometimes it can be more tricky to know your partner’s true feelings until you have discussed them.
Life pro tip: Investigate their personality as much as (or even more!) than their sexual organs
The second part to alignment is compatibility, being aligned in your interests, personality, and lifestyle choices. Again, some parts of compatibility are quite straightforward, such as your interests. After going on a few dates, you can tell whether or not you both like high energy parties, or expensive dinners, or sports, and most importantly, what things you both won’t participate in or tolerate. Of course there should be some compromising, but if you find yourselves disagreeing on how to spend your time together, you’ve got a compatibility problem.
Some of the more complex compatibility alignment shows up in the realm of personalities. Personality is the backbone of lifestyle preferences and interests but can play out in more unpredictable ways. In her insightful book The Defining Decade, Dr. Meg Jay writes that your big 5 personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) should be relatively closely aligned to have a more seamless, compatible long-term relationship. Besides being aligned in your reasons for your relationship and liking a person for what they do, you have to like a person for who they actually are — what defines their personality.
Dr. Jay explains that many dating couples unknowingly ignore major incompatibilities. They find activities they both enjoy and rarely put themselves in situations where their personality differences come head to head. Then the pair will go on a vacation together or a similarly challenging situation and realize that they have major differences and that they don’t like each other nearly as much as they once thought. It pays to do a little personality analysis and put yourselves in some more challenging situations, including having uncomfortable conversations, to really know your similarities and differences.
Of course, personality differences can be overcome, and personality traits can drift or even change drastically, especially through your twenties. Some traits even change more aggressively as you grow with your partner and work on smoothing over your rougher edges.
As Haley began to rely less on emotions and think things through more and be more logical, her neuroticism plummeted from high to medium-low. As I became more in touch with my emotions and heard more about Haley’s love for animals, my openness increased as well. Both of these changes helped align our personalities better, and both were made totally by choice with the intent to improve ourselves rather than be better for the other person.
The oh so scary monster under your bed: Commitment
The final area of alignment is in your commitment level and how much you want to be in each others’ lives. As people explore their sexulaities outside of the boundaries of traditional two-person, heterosexual relationships, a larger variety of relationship types has emerged. From open relationships to “we do everything and go everywhere together” couples, it is absolutely necessary to be 100% on the same page.
Trust issues are the most poisoning thing to a relationship, and they inevitably come from commitment failures or being at a different level of commitment. If two people have an open relationship and both genuinely want that to be their commitment level, it can work for them. However, if one member is lying to themselves and wants more exclusivity, the relationship will completely faceplant.
The same goes for couples who are highly committed and share everything with each other, or anything in between. If you want to share 100% of your lives with each other or be more of a mutual support figure for each other as you excel at your individual lives, you gotta want the same thing.
High levels of commitment can be tough, and it can feel like you are giving up some freedoms. In his marvelous book Everything is F*cked, Mark Manson writes about how highly commiting to one place, idea, or person isn’t walling yourself off from all the other opportunities, but it is the only way to unlock the full upside of a relationship, and I have to agree.
There is a certain depth of relationship that can only be achieved through total commitment, and for most people, the benefits gained only from this depth far outvalue the “lost freedoms”. I believe that high levels of commitment while still remaining your own individuals consistently generates the healthiest, longest lasting, and most mutually enjoyable relationships.