Is your partner "the one?" Wrong question | George Blair-West

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Marriage has meant many things throughout history, but marrying for love is a relatively new phenomenon for humanity. In this archive talk, author and psychiatrist George Blair West says we still don't fully understand what it means to build successful relationships. He highlights a few surprising findings on the ability to tell if a marriage will end just by how it started and shares four questions every couple can ask themselves before tying the knot.

0:47Around 500 years ago, Erasmus told us that prevention was better than cure. Now that might seem forward thinking, but when blood-sucking leeches are the best cure you've got at your disposal, while you're hanging around waiting for the 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. 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.

1:41Now, 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? And 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. For example, one of the more significant predictors of divorce is how long a couple date before the marriage proposal.

2:39In a 2015 US study of 3 ,100 people, they found that if the couple waited one to two years, there was a 21 % 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%. 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.

3:43Why? 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, it's a shared failure with the universe, a much better deal than having to blame just ourselves. Is your potential partner the one is the wrong question.

4:31In 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. A 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, the children from the families where their parents had divorced were more than twice as likely to be divorced themselves or to be unemployed.

5:22They 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 % 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. 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.

6:18So, how am I defining marriage? Well, I would see it as any relationship entered into by two people on the basis that will be long term and is recognised 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.

7:09I 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 in 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 % of recorded history, arranged marriages have been the norm for the entire planet.

7:57Until 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 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 bathwater.

8:57I 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-honoured 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, and it occurs in a greater culture that is supportive of divorce.

9:52So 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, go on when it comes to our romantic love marriages. Divorce rate in love marriages, circa 40%. 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. Birth rates are of particular importance to governments because they underpin long-term economic growth.

10:40In the USA today, birth rates are below population replacement levels. 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 determined 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. 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.

11:32And 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. 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 10 years, the levels in the arranged marriages are significantly higher. What's going on?

12:25Well, my take on it is that when people marry for love, they hope the love 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 feeling at these times is not only of no surprise to them, it is of little concern to them.

13:13Commitment 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. So he and his co-workers undertook a number of studies to answer that question. In one particular study, they looked at 35 factors that could build love over time. 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 you. Allow me to reduce this research down, along with my clinical experience, to one sentence.

14:06My 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. Now of course to effectively nurture somebody's personal growth you have to be empathically 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.

15:01Judgment 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. 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.

15:31Instead 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.

16:08That was George Blair West at TEDxBrisbane in Australia. This talk originally aired in 2022. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curationguidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.