How to find 'The One', according to the data
There are few more important decisions in life than choosing the person you’re going to spend the rest of your days with, says matchmaker and couples counsellor Paul C Brunson. But even so, many of us get it wrong.
‘In my experience, the biggest reason relationships fail is because we pick bad partners,’ he explains. ‘Life is stressful, and the beauty of a strong intimate relationship is that it can help you manage stress. When you have a challenging relationship, everything becomes more difficult.’
Brunson argues that great relationships help us grow and become better at a multitude of things, from our jobs to raising children. ‘A lot of people find the cracks in their relationship begin to show when they have kids – and maybe it isn’t really the kids,’ he says. ‘Maybe the partner just wasn’t the strongest partner you could have chosen.’
Brunson has been working in the dating space for more than a decade, first as the founder of a successful matchmaking agency in Washington DC, then as a relationships expert on television (in the UK, he’s a regular on Married At First Sight UK and Celebs Go Dating). In 2023, Brunson joined Tinder as global relationship insights expert, a role that sees him analyse a wealth of data about how we search for and find love.
‘My skill is really an ability to look at the data – whether that’s online dating research, relationship psychology or anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered from working with clients – and piece it together,’ Brunson says. ‘I’m first and foremost a researcher.’
Whether you’re single and looking for love, or in a partnership and wondering if they’re “the one”, the intention of Brunson’s latest book, Find Love: How To Navigate Modern Love And Discover The Right Partner For You, is to arm you with the tools you need to better understand the relationship landscape and identify the strongest partner for you.
‘Love is emotional,’ says Brunson, ‘but we need a strategy. It’s about finding someone who can help you be your best self.’
Here, he shares some of his tips and insights for finding the right long-term relationship.
Set your relationship goals
‘One of the biggest challenges of finding love today is our own belief that we have endless options,’ says Brunson. ‘We live in an age in which Tinder, the largest dating app in the world, has been downloaded 530m times and there’s a sense that we can swipe, swipe, swipe. The connections we make can feel disposable, which means that people can behave in ways they wouldn’t have done before – perhaps ghost someone, or send an explicit photo.
At the same time, our criteria for a partner have never been higher – while our grandparents sought marriage primarily for financial stability, our parents’ generation placed more emphasis on finding true romance. Nowadays, the expectation is for relationships to fulfil us in every way: we want a partner who enables us to grow in all directions, so there’s more pressure to find the right match.
One way of navigating this overwhelming landscape is to have very clear relationship goals. When we fine-tune our criteria and are more intentional (do we need a partner that inspires us creatively, for instance? Or would a partner who shares a hobby with us be okay?), we reduce our options by default and start to ascribe higher value to our selections. Better still, when we voice our relationship goals and stick by them, we start to weed out the wrong partners for us.’
Understand yourself – and how you show up
‘One thing we routinely fail to examine when choosing a partner is the impact of our past on our selection. Perhaps your first lover continually distanced themselves from for those who had a much longer courtship, and there’s a reason for that: two years is an optimum time you and, a result, you think that love is distancing yourself. This is a filter through which you see relationships, but are you aware of it? Research shows that 50-60% of adults have suffered some sort of relationship trauma in their lives, but how many of us can say that we’ve addressed that trauma? And if we haven’t, we need to ask the question: are we actively making the selection when choosing a partner, or are we being chosen?
In understanding how we show up in the dating marketplace, it can also be helpful to consider our perception of our value within it. As a society, we have a whole list of attributes that we prize in potential partners, from jobs to where we live. In evolutionary psychology, we call the sum of these attributes ‘mate value’. It’s worth thinking about your own ‘mate value’ and whether you’re leveraging it, because studies show that while men assign themselves a disproportionately higher ‘mate value’, women tend to do the opposite. This not only affects how you show up in the dating marketplace, but who you choose to pursue and date.’
Call upon your support network
‘While online dating has provided us with more opportunities to date than ever before, the stats show that a very small percentage of people in the dating pool – approximately 20% or less – are going on all of the dates. In the past, people would often call upon the input of their family and friends when dating, but evidence shows that most people choosing a partner nowadays do so in silo. And while women are more likely to confide in friends about dating, men generally don’t.
From my experience in the matchmaking space, there’s lots to be gained from a ‘feedback loop’: our friends and family know us best. But there’s also value in going to the very ends of our support networks. If you consider the psychologist and anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s theory that each of us is capable of approximately 150 social connections, then combine it with the theory that it’s within our ‘weakest ties’ that our biggest opportunities lie, it makes sense that some of our best connections would lie in the 150th friend – the one you haven’t talked to in a while.
My tip for strengthening weak ties is to message three people on WhatsApp each week who you haven’t spoken to for years. And if you’re spending seven hours a week on dating apps, try spending five of them building up your support network.’
Get rid of biases
‘I have a general piece of advice when it comes to removing the biases that get in the way of us meeting a long-term partner: give up the 50 things that mean nothing. There is enough data out there to tell us exactly what qualities we should be looking for if we want high-level satisfaction in a relationship – and that doesn’t include the way somebody talks or what they wear.
I also think we need to reframe how we think about online dating. In this space, we’re ultra-conscious of the visual and there’s a lot of hypergamy among highly educated individuals. The problem with this is that by focusing on the superficial, we discount the value of traits that only really come across in real life, such as confidence and charisma.
It’s worth noting that straight men typically don’t put a lot of effort into their profiles. It’s not an understatement to say that they generally post horrendous photos (I always recommend posting three to five photos – a smiley one, a full body shot and one in which you’re doing an activity you’re passionate about).
Studies at Tinder have also shown us that the main issue men have in connecting with women is fear of approaching them and being rejected. If you lack confidence, it can help to try to think of ‘online dating’ as simply ‘online meeting’ – if we just see it as a tool to meet people, not a space in which we date them, the bar is lowered.’
Use the five fundamentals
‘Over the years, I’ve settled on a list of five fundamental personality traits or characteristics that I believe everyone needs in a partner. In my opinion, being deficient in one of these five core criteria is a legitimate reason to discount a potential relationship, because you’re unlikely to experience long-term satisfaction. I’ve purposely left sexual satisfaction off the list because the five fundamentals are the foundation to a satisfying sex life. The same goes for humour – they’ll have a good sense of humour if they’re emotionally available and curious.
While I’m not saying your partner has to be perfect, each of the five should be demonstrated at a minimally acceptable level:
1. Emotional fitness
This is made up of number of aspects: emotional availability, emotional stability (the ability to restablise after stress or change) and emotional intelligence. This is something you will need to be a bit of a journalist about, as it can only be observed over time.
2. Courage
I like to think of this as a willingness to face your fears, but also having vision. Will they step out of their comfort zone? If somebody has no vision, they’re unlikely to experience any personal growth and you’re unlikely to be satisfied in the relationship.
3. Resilience
How do they respond when hard times come? When they’re knocked down, do they get back up in a healthy way? Also: are they resourceful? Lots of people want to marry a CEO, but if they lost their job tomorrow, would they be able to figure out another way?
4. Curiosity
This is really having an interest in people and one of the most important characteristics in a partner full stop. Curiosity is the foundation to everything, and has been linked to higher rates of marital satisfaction.
5. Kindness
This is fairly simple: are they considerate and compassionate? Will they put someone else’s priorities before their own?’
Give it two years
‘If your partner displays all the five fundamentals, the final piece of the puzzle is assessing what I call their ‘commitment readiness’. Research has shown divorce rates are lower for people who marry after two years than for those who had a much longer courtship, and there’s a reason for that: two years is an optimum time to get the true measure of a person and your compatibility.
If you’ve been together for two years but your partner hasn’t committed to a future with you, I would say that they’ll never be ready. I met a woman recently who had been with her partner for three years and they had a child, and she asked me why he still didn’t want to get married. My response to that was that the reason they didn’t get married in the first place was because he didn’t want to. The fact that she observed this about her partner, identified that it didn’t fit her goals and still chose to stay is the reason she’ll never be fully satisfied in the relationship.
Two years is the period in which we go through what some call the three cycles of life: the ups, downs and in betweens. If you’ve survived that and your partner still measures up, you’re hopefully looking at a wonderful future.’
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