Who is The One?
This week’s newsletter is inspired by discount dayanands - people who want professional advice on relationships, but at a discount. Instead of having to sell my time for cheap to a handful of people, I figured I’d much rather donate my time where benefits scale - so I am summarising my thoughts on one of the most frequently asked questions - how can I figure out who is The One?
Revise this much and go, you’ll get full marks, I promise.
Disclaimer
This is meant only for those who’re not in long-term stable relationships at the moment. I don’t want any of you committed folk getting too excited with this brilliant framework and ruining things with your partners. The lockdown is hard enough on relationships, so take it easy, uncles and aunties.
Myth of The One.
We’re all trained on right or wrong, black or white, our religion or not, our caste or not, right or left type fodder our entire lives and so in order to make sense of relationships, we invented the myth of The One.
Lets explore this myth a little bit - How do you define The One?
Plugs all the holes in your soul and is your better half?
Photographs well in the pre-wedding photoshoot?
Makes everyone who attends your wedding jealous of you?
Produces miracles in gene propagation?
Is with you in sickness and health, rich or poor without so much as a whimper?
Accepts you like you’ve never even accepted yourself?
Insurance to happily ever after?
I don’t know about you, but as far as I’m concerned, what you are after, doesn’t exist, my friend. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again - Relationships are built, not handed out on a platter by some perfect individual.
So, can we rephrase the question to find a more comforting answer.
How to evaluate if someone makes for a good partner?
Although we might all scoff at our parents for wanting a tall, fair and slim wife, but we must appreciate the foresight. They are optimising for the quality of their successors. So, the question is, what are you optimising for?
What you need from a relationship must define who you must be with and not the other way around.
I have a three step approach to answer this question:
Understanding who we are
How this influences our needs
Who is most likely to satisfy these needs
Understanding who we are
Whether we’d care to admit or not, we identify ourselves a certain way, which makes it harder for us to be agile in certain environments, and we are more likely to thrive in certain environments, especially the ones that are most accepting of our innate nature.
A simple trick to identify our most innate nature is to make a laundry list of words that we or our friends or family use to describe us. We then reduce this list to 5 mutually exclusive adjectives/ expressions that describe us the best. We iterate this process until we’ve a combination of 5 words that rather accurately describes us.
Example: Intelligent, ambitious, insecure, lazy, empathetic, yada yada yada.
How this influences our needs
For each of the 5 aspects of your personality, think about environments or situations that have comforted, nurtured or positively challenged it. You may think of relationships at home, school, work, with friends or past lovers to help articulate what was beneficial for that aspect of your personality.
In this manner, you’ve arrived at a list of 5 different values you want from a relationship. Take a hard look at the list, and ask yourself if this defines your needs accurately. If not, over several iterations, build your stack of top 5 values and make sure they’re correlated to all aspects of your personality that you identified as being important in the previous step.
Example (Picking a tough one here): If you identify as being insecure, you may want to think about what makes you the most insecure and how that affects the rest of you. For instance, if you’re insecure about your body, you may appreciate a judgement free relationship where you are in control of how you feel about your body. Building a judgement free relationship takes two people, so if you’re looking for space for your body, you’re unintentionally signing up to make space for your partner’s vulnerabilities too.
Who is most likely to satisfy these needs
From the previous step, you have a general idea on what type of a relationship you can thrive in, and so now, you translate these to personality traits that are most likely to bring the values you need into the relationship.
Example: You’ve identified that you need a judgement-free environment, so who is most likely to provide that? First and foremost, someone who respects you in general. Someone you can trust. Someone with integrity. Someone who’s secure about things you aren’t. Someone who understands what it means to feel insecure or vulnerable.
Once you’ve identified personality traits that are most likely to bring the values you need into a relationship, you’ve the qualities of someone who makes for a great partner to YOU.
Passing marks
Before evaluation, it’s imperative that you establish what the passing marks will be. You’ve a stack of 5 qualities that you want in a partner. What’s the likelihood that you’ll find all 5 in one guy?
Zero.
Ok optimists, let’s just say close to zero.
Better?
Right, so how many of the 5 can you hope for? 3? 4?
You go figure which 3 or which 4 matter to you the most and go optimise for that. This is your threshold, and essentially anyone who crosses this must be considered a prime candidate that you get to know further before you make a decision on whether you want to spend the rest of your life with them.
Don’t worry about setting your standards too low. You need to only end up with one person, so as long as your passing mark is well above class average, you’re fine.
How many applicants are allowed to take the assessment?
There are at least 100million people in the world that you could potentially explore building a relationship with, but who has the time for that now? Let’s say you can set aside 6 months of your life for active partner search, you might meet 6 prospects that you could try and apply this framework on, or less. Key is that you are realistic about the time you’re setting aside for this process and how committed you will be. Whether you meet 5 people or 50, it only makes a marginal difference to how likely you are in finding that 80% candidate, thanks to fatigue. What ever experience you gain by evaluating 50 prospects is lost in fatigue that sets in due to talking to so many people. So, you go figure what works for you.
Boss, where’s the magic?
Too logical and rational for you? You want magic ah? Too many movies you’re watching. Magic it seems manangatti. This is arranged marriage, not love marriage. First of all, if you’re reading this means, you don’t have love marriage scene. Can we make peace with that first?
They are two different sports - love marriage has two players who enter the field without a goal whereas arranged marriage has at least 6 players with a goal and no goal keepers. So, first of all, you decide which sport you want to play. Then practice, and think about entering “around 5 miles”, national level or international level. Winning and all, you’ve to leave it to God only.
If you really want magic means get married, stay with the same person for 50 years, and tell me if you could’ve pulled off this trick with anyone else.
Sneak peak into what I’m reading/ listening to:
Aranyaka - by Amrutha Patil and Devdutt Patnaik. This was a strange book. Strange in a good way though. For me, this book was about love, and freedom. I love Amrutha’s illustrations in general, and I found it interesting that Devdutt, who is a great illustrator himself actually collaborated with someone else to do this.
Are newsletters the new blogs? I am re-reading my old blogposts to see if they’re still relevant. It feels very strange because I don’t identify with the person who’s written it as being me from the past. Rather, it feels like this person belongs in the future. So, what does that make me right now? The past, present or future?
Just music - Been listening to this playlist made by Spotify on loop to just help me get through my writing.
Great article ! On your MBA service though / could have come up with a better name. Not a good idea to try and mock your own potential clients