The Special Misery of Searching for Your Soul Mate

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I have been reading Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg. It is a fascinating book about how much things have changed—from not that many years ago to now—for people searching for a partner, date, or mate in this hyper-connected era. The authors are insightful, often funny, and at times quite irreverent.

One passage in particular follows a stream of thought on the work of Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice) who has written lucidly about the dilemmas that having so many choices presents for people in this modern era. I have long loved Schwartz's work, and this particular point below is one shared by Ansari and Klinenberg. It is of surpassing brilliance; let it wash over you for a bit:

By Schwartz’s logic, we are probably looking for “the best” and, in fact, we are looking for our soul mates, too. Is this possible to find? “How many people do you need to see before you know you’ve found the best?” Schwartz asked. “The answer is every damn person there is. How else do you know it’s the best? If you’re looking for the best, this is a recipe for complete misery.”

You see the brilliance here, don't you? If you are searching and you believe your goal is to find the perfect partner for you, you literally can never stop searching. You have to meet every possible choice there is—or how else are you ever going to know you stopped on the best option? And in a day and age where you can search for anything and often find it just about any way you want it, we have become used to thinking we can find the perfect anything—a job, an app, a restaurant, a plumber, or a partner who is perfect for you.

The allure of it all suggests that perfect matching is always possible.

Schwartz' research shows that people who think this way are less likely to be happy with their eventual choices than those who think more in terms of finding a good match. Ansari and Klinenberg mention one study by Schwartz about people searching for jobs, in which he finds that those who hold this belief, and who likely do search more, end up being paid somewhat more but also end up being less happy with the job they eventually land.

Sure, when it comes to marriage especially, one should seek a very good match. But you can also search so long and so thoroughly that you pass up a potentially great match or never settle down at all—or only settle down when all of the very good options have passed you by, already taken.

Schwartz's point is that the very belief that you can find a perfect match at the end of a search sets you up to think there must always be something better—and that this belief can make you less happy with whatever, or whoever, you eventually choose.

Commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. That's the deal. But having a sense that you could have searched for and found perfection—if you'd only searched a little more—will make it harder to commit to, invest in, and be happy with who you marry.

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