Have Some Flexibility With Your Deal-Breakers

When it comes to romance, that is, successful romance, not all perceived deal-breakers are actually deal-breakers.

My very own epic failure of a first marriage taught me that.

We’d gotten married at such a young age that we really had no life experience, and we paid dearly for the lessons we learned.

One of those lessons was my learning that being married doesn’t always translate to being close. I’d say that chronic loneliness was one of the biggest problems in that relationship.

I tried to make things better by regularly engaging in activities together, especially in the first year. The repeated failure was so confusing.

"Do you want to go to a movie?" I asked.

"No thanks," she responded.

"How about a walk along the river?"

"Uh-uh."

"Maybe we could go to the mall and look around?"

"I don't feel like it."

[Long, thoughtful silence]

"I have a question for you," I eventually said. "Is there anything I could suggest to do that, if you liked doing it, you'd like to do it with me?"

A quick smile lasted a whole beat before she said, "Not really."

I was not raised to be a quitter, so I stayed another 17 years before I got a divorce. My takeaway lesson: Find a partner who likes doing the things I like doing.

The big thing I liked doing back then was backpacking. The forests! The lakes! No bathrooms! So, in my fantasy future relationship, we went for walks, hiking, and backpacking. It was great—in my imagination.

One day, when I was 40 years old, my office phone rang, and I heard the dulcet tones of a woman on a random business call. Calls like that were often a nuisance for a newly minted marriage and family therapist trying to make a go of his solo practice, but...that voice!

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This was 1994, pre-internet, so there was no way I was going to meet this woman who lived 743 miles away, but then, you know, she had this voice.

We started talking, and after hundreds of hours of conversation, we started long-distance dating. During this time, I took mental notes on what we had in common: a love of books, a passion for art, food, fashion, and a mutual and insatiable need for affection. But what about backpacking?

Her answer was as firm as it was loving: “I would love to be waiting for you, a cocktail in my hand, when you get home so you can tell me about your adventure while we soak in the tub.”

That answer wasn’t bad, right?

At first, I was still somewhat disappointed. The memories of rejection and loneliness from my first marriage were still fresh and remained vividly painful. How can I get into a relationship with a woman who doesn’t like doing what I like doing? Will I feel as lonely as I did in my last relationship?

The more I thought about it, the more clarity I had about backpacking as a deal-breaker: It wasn’t about backpacking at all; it was about the worst kind of loneliness—the loneliness you feel in a committed relationship, where the singular prevailing truth is that your mate doesn’t really like you.

Funny story: In the middle of my epic failure of a marriage, wife #1 insisted that she did, in fact, like me. I replied, “OK, tell me three things you like about me.” Crickets. Point made.

But this woman with the voice was different. She’d made it clear in words and deeds that she didn’t merely like me; she was crazy about me. And it wasn’t like we didn’t have lots of other subjects, dreams for the future, and passions for everyday living in common, because we did.

I counted the needs I had that were clearly met by this wonderful woman:

• She’s in love with lots of things about me (and that included that I was an outdoorsy type)
• She’s great company because she’s so smart and very funny
• She likes talking about the kinds of subjects that mean a lot to me and even listening to my take on all that

Eventually, I saw that backpacking was a coded placeholder for a much more painful idea: I had been married to a woman who didn’t like me, and backpacking together was a stand-in for the fantasy of being meaningfully connected.

Over time, backpacking was standing in for a complicated idea that included fantasies of the future and what we nowadays call a “trigger.”

Saying “no” to backpacking, in my mind, meant a woman didn’t like me or want to be with me and didn’t get me at all—until I met a woman who did like me, get me, and, best of all, want to be with me, as in forever.

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Nowadays, I get my outdoor fix in a gazillion unforeseen ways. My everyday life is filled with practices that connect me to nature in a meaningful way: I garden or think about my garden; I meditate; I sleep in the outdoors; I share my life with my dog, who shows me her wild nature as she hunts from her leash on our walks; and the list goes on and on.

I still have deal-breakers like, say, smoking. Smoking is not a moral issue for me, but I can’t deal with it. A lack of intellectual curiosity would be another deal-breaker, and so would an attitude of willful ignorance. Those last two things would make me feel alone again, like I didn’t have a partner.

But now, when I go backpacking, or do anything else I do on my own, I come home to a woman who actually likes me. She is there, waiting, a cocktail in hand, to listen to my adventures while we soak in the tub. Not bad, right?