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Home » Is Your Partner “The One?” Wrong Question: George Blair-West (Transcript) 

Is Your Partner “The One?” Wrong Question: George Blair-West (Transcript) 

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.

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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.