Here is the full transcript of psychiatrist George Blair-West’s talk titled “Is Your Partner “The One?” Wrong Question” at TED 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Importance of Prevention
Around 500 years ago, Erasmus told us that prevention was better than cure. Now, that might seem forward-thinking, but when bloodsucking leeches are the best cure you’ve got at your disposal, while you’re hanging around, waiting from them to work, you’ve got to start to wonder why this clearly bizarre treatment was needed in the first place. And I’m going to propose that preventing long-term relationship breakdown is as important as preventing serious illness. And I’m going to suggest that the way we see romantic love, and in particular finding “the one,” is a big part of that problem.
So in my 20 years of working with couples, I’ve come to see a relationship breakdown as being the result of an inability to overcome an emerging mismatch in the relationship. Now, why do I use that word mismatch? Well, it steps around an issue that can otherwise hijack therapy. The question of who is to blame, which of course is the other person.
And this approach allows me to then focus on making or remaking the match. But that got me wondering. So when does the mismatch begin? If prevention is the goal, when does the problem take hold? I found that if I looked back, the majority of the time, I could trace it to before that couple actually even committed. Before they married, before they had children.
The Impact of Dating Time on Divorce
For example, one of the more significant predictors of divorce is how long a couple date before the marriage proposal. In a 2015 US study of 3,100 people, they found that if the couple waited one to two years, there was a 21 percent reduced likelihood of divorce compared to if they proposed in less than 12 months.
But if you waited three and a half years until the infatuation was well and truly over, then the likelihood of divorce was reduced by a massive 48 percent.
So my daughter, a dating coach, and I wrote a book about how to choose your partner. It was an exhaustive psychological review on how to make an informed decision. When that book came out recently, what everybody wanted to talk about, media and readers alike, was a preference for not choosing the one, but finding them through the admittedly romantic process. But it was a spectacularly passive process of falling in love.
The Reluctance to See Love as a Decision
Why? Well, my take on it is that we would rather see the process of romantic love bring the one to us rather than slowing down and evaluating in an informed way whether or not they’re a good match for us. When I looked at a deeper level, at a less conscious level, I saw that we really don’t want to see it as a decision, because then we have to take responsibility for it.
And if it fails, that is a burden of some consequence. When it’s a romantic process and it fails, well, that’s a shared failure with the universe. A much better deal than having to blame just ourselves.
The Most Consequential Decision
Is your potential partner the one is the wrong question. In fact, I believe that’s a question that is more likely to lead to divorce. But before we look at better questions, let’s look at what’s at stake. Because I would suggest that choosing your lifelong partner is the most consequential decision you will make.
Most of us appreciate the pain, emotional and financial, that divorce causes a couple, but it’s the impact on the next generation that has my attention. The study of 1,400 people looked at the long-term impact of parental divorce during their childhood, when they were followed up at age 32. Now, as you can see, the children from the families where their parents had divorced were more than twice as likely to be divorced themselves or to be unemployed.
They were more likely to smoke on a daily basis and drink alcohol to excess. They were much less likely to complete a university degree, with daughters a staggering 58 percent less likely to do so. And girls, apparently more vulnerable to parental marital breakdown than boys were more likely to suffer from a range of psychological problems.
The Wide-Ranging Impact of Relationship Breakdown
It is said that alcoholism is not a spectator sport. Eventually, the whole family has to play. And the damage from a parental relationship breakdown is equally impossible to limit to just the parents. And this is why having children is a big complication and a much bigger commitment than getting married.
So how am I defining marriage? Well, I would see it as any relationship entered into by two people on the basis it will be long-term and is recognized either legally or in common law. But for the record, I believe any two people of any persuasion, of either gender or of no gender, who wish to spend their life together should be legally able to do so throughout the world.
But for the purposes of this talk, we’re going to be looking at legal marriages because they’re the ones more readily identified by researchers. Now, that definition, of course, includes arranged marriages. For those of us who’ve grown up with love marriages and romantic love, we see that as the normal way of things.
The Global Prevalence of Arranged Marriages
I think I can predict that most of you here had parents who chose each other on the basis of romantic love. I think I can more confidently predict that you’re probably not going to get those very same parents to choose your marital partner, a partner who you might meet for the first time on the day of your marriage. Unless, of course, they’re producers of reality TV shows.
But despite our sense that a love marriage is the norm, by a slight majority, from a global perspective, a marriage today is more likely to be arranged than not. Moreover, for 95 percent of recorded history, arranged marriages have been the norm for the entire planet. Until then, romantic love only accidentally overlapped with marriage.
Now arranged marriages take many forms. And to be clear, I’m not talking here about forced marriages, child marriages. These are a violation of human rights.
The Modern Arranged Marriage
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that individuals should be 18 years old before they enter marriage, and do so freely with full consent. But the reason that brought that declaration into being leaves many of us feeling that arranged marriages are old and irrelevant. At least I did until I came across some rather compelling research.
Now I’m going to suggest that if we dismiss arranged marriages without considering what I call the modern arranged marriage, then we’re throwing out the baby with the bath water. I asked a Pakistani man that I interviewed for my research how he felt about potentially a matchmaker — his mother, his aunts, his prospect’s mother, her aunts — all choosing his marital partner. He said, “Well, of course all these people should choose my partner. They know much more than I do of such things. I’m only 35 years old.”
What he was talking about was tapping into a time-honored collective wisdom around matchmaking. How do we define the modern arranged marriage? Well, this is where each partner has power of veto and some input into the choice of their partner.
Love Marriages vs Modern Arranged Marriages
And it occurs in a greater culture that is supportive of divorce. So the research we’re about to look at comes out of the USA. So how have the last 200 years, a mere blip in history, gone when it comes to our romantic love marriages?
Divorce rate in love marriages, circa 40 percent. Because we’re getting married when we’re older, when our personality and our values have consolidated, divorce rates are falling, but so too are marriage rates. In the USA today, people are avoiding marriage entirely, more than any other time in history.
Single-parent families are more common after love marriages. Birthrates are of particular importance to governments because they underpin long-term economic growth. In the USA today, birth rates are below population replacement levels.
Marital Satisfaction in Modern Arranged Marriages
In a study done on modern arranged marriages in the US, where partners had some input into partner selection, they looked at four factors that determine marital satisfaction: loving, loyalty, shared values and issues around finances. The average duration of the marriage was more than 11 years, and each individual filled out their questionnaires separately. The arranged marriages are the ones on your left.
Yes, the ones that are higher on each of those four parameters. Two points of note. Maybe surprisingly, the reports from the women were no different from the reports from the men.
But the finding that fascinates me is that “greater involvement” in partner selection did not improve marital satisfaction scores. Now just let that sink in. Getting each partner to factor in who they were more attracted to did not increase love or marital satisfaction scores.
Love in Arranged vs Love Marriages over Time
So it would seem that not finding the one, or more specifically, having somebody else find them for you is the secret to marital bliss. Professor Robert Epstein is an American researcher who has studied this phenomenon in some depth. And he’s found the crossover, the point at which love in the arranged marriages exceeds that in the love marriages, occurs around five years.
By ten years, the levels in the arranged marriages are significantly higher. What’s going on? Well, my take on it is that when people marry for love, they hope the love will carry them through the tough times. The conflict, the life stressors. But romantic feelings do not coexist well beside the feelings that go with stress and conflict. They get pushed aside.
Such that the couples I work with who’ve had repeated problems tell me they have now fallen out of love. In an arranged marriage, all you have from the outset is a commitment. A commitment to make it work no matter what, and to make it work as a team.
The lack of romantic feel at these times is not only of no surprise to them, it is of little concern to them. Commitment carries you through the tough times. Romantic love not so much. So what do we find if we study the modern arranged marriages to find how they build love over time? This takes us back to Epstein’s work. He and his coworkers undertook a number of studies to answer that question.
Top Factors for Building Love over Time
In one particular study, they looked at 35 factors that could build love over time. Here are the top five. Nothing conveys love more than making sacrifices for your partner. Now I’m not suggesting that we return to arranged marriages. But I do think they have something to teach us. Allow me to reduce this research down along with my clinical experience, to one sentence.
My definition of true love, that I believe underpins successful long-term relationships. True love is the feeling of being fully accepted by another who is committed to nurturing both your personal growth and their own.
The Importance of Personal Growth and Responsibility
Now of course, to effectively nurture somebody’s personal growth, you have to be emphatically interested in where they are on both a day-by-day basis and in the longer term. Equally importantly, we have to take responsibility for our own personal growth. You cannot rely on your partner to meet all of your needs.
It does take a village to grow an adult. In conclusion, I know people fall head over heels in love feeling they have found the one. Judgment free. If you’re young and you just want to fall in love, then do that. You want to get married when you’re older anyway. And when it happens, enjoy the hell out of it while it lasts.
Key Questions for Choosing a Partner
But please, please remember, you do not have to marry them. Or with much greater finality, have children with them. That’s why contraception was invented.
Instead of asking “Are you the one,” ask two questions of each of you. Do I accept my partner despite their shortcomings? Do I commit to nurture them to achieve what is important to them? And likewise, do they accept me and do they commit to me? All you need is four yeses. Thank you.