It may be one of the most important questions we ever ask ourselves: Is this the person I should build a family with? Am I passing up someone better? Will what I feel now be enough to sustain a lifetime together?
Most of us are taught that love is the most important factor in choosing a partner. In reality, love matters enormously, but it is not enough. What determines whether two people can build a life together is not only how intensely they love each other, but how deeply compatible they are. The problem is that most of us know very well whom we are attracted to, but far less about what we actually need.
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Everyone asks how to build a good relationship, but far fewer ask how to choose the right person in the first place
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In my view, long-term relationships and marriages tend to break down for two broad reasons. The first is that we chose someone who was not right for us. The second is that we never learned how to build a healthy relationship.
Most books, therapists and workshops focus on the second. Much less attention is given to the question that comes before it: How do we choose the right person in the first place?
Therapist and author Esther Perel has drawn a useful distinction between a “love story” and a “life story.” A love story can be thrilling, dramatic, passionate and exciting. A life story requires something very different: two people capable of creating a shared reality over many years.
You can deeply love someone who is not right for you. You can also be the wrong person for someone who loves you with all their heart. That is difficult to accept because many of us grew up believing that love conquers everything. But love is only the starting point. It may be the reason to enter a relationship, but it is not necessarily the reason to remain in one.
The wrong question
Most of us look for the answer to “Is this the right person?” in the wrong place. We ask how much we are in love, how attracted we are, whether there is chemistry, whether we think about the other person all day and whether it simply feels like “this is it.” But none of those things necessarily predicts what we really want to know: Can I build a life with this person?
Flowers are wonderful, but does he make you feel safe?
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One of the biggest mistakes we make is confusing chemistry with compatibility. Chemistry tells us whom we want to be with. Compatibility tells us whom we can build a life with. Chemistry and passion largely respond to our desires; compatibility responds to our needs.
We can easily say that we want someone attractive, charismatic, successful or exciting. It is much harder to answer deeper questions: What makes me feel secure? What kind of communication allows me to thrive? Which values genuinely matter to me? What kind of person brings out the best version of me?
Until we understand our emotional needs and the values that matter most to us, we will keep choosing partners based largely on how strongly we feel about them.
Falling in love itself can make that confusion worse because of a well-known psychological bias called the halo effect. When someone strikes us as beautiful, charismatic, successful or impressive, we tend to attribute other positive qualities to them that we have no real evidence they possess, such as sensitivity, maturity, reliability or the ability to be a good partner.
We fall in love with a smile, a look, the way someone carries themselves or the way they speak, then draw sweeping conclusions about their character.
To a large extent, infatuation tells us more about ourselves than it does about the person in front of us. It reveals what we feel is missing, what we value and what fantasies we project onto another person. That is why the number of people we are capable of falling in love with is far greater than the number of people with whom we can successfully build a life. We might fall in love with many people. We can build a home with far fewer.
Are you heading in the same direction?
Compatibility does not mean being identical. You do not need to enjoy the same movies or music, nor do you need to agree on every issue. Compatibility means being broadly aligned on the things that truly matter: seeing life through similar lenses, wanting roughly the same future and attaching similar importance to family, fidelity, money, children, career, freedom, intimacy and commitment.
Compatibility means being able to see life through a similar lens
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You can love someone deeply while wanting completely different lives. One person wants children and the other does not. One wants to remain in Israel while the other dreams of leaving. One needs stability while the other constantly seeks adventure. One views a relationship as a deep partnership, while the other sees it primarily as a space that allows them to continue living much as they did before. Those are not minor differences. They are differences in the direction of your lives.
You can love each other despite those gaps, perhaps even because of them. Opposites do attract. But living with those differences for decades can be extremely difficult. The more two people share similar values, compatible emotional needs and a common vision of the future, the more likely they are to build a stable relationship after the intensity of early infatuation fades.
Sometimes I think that if everyone arrived at a fourth date carrying a sheet of paper titled “This is what a good relationship looks like to me” and exchanged it with the person sitting across from them, we could prevent a great deal of pain, wasted time and perhaps quite a few divorces.
I would not actually recommend doing that on a fourth date, of course. But we should remember that we do not marry only a person, but also their worldview, values and vision of the future.
Most of us spend months figuring out whether there is chemistry while barely asking whether we want the same kind of life. Love begins in the meeting between two people. Compatibility reveals itself in the meeting between two visions of life.
Another common mistake is falling in love with potential instead of reality. People stay in relationships for years because they believe they know who their partner “could become”: if only they went to therapy, if only they matured, if only they committed.
But we do not marry someone’s potential. We marry the person as they are today. People can change, but only when they themselves want to. Hoping that someone will change is not a relationship plan.
The 3 most important questions to ask yourself
If you are in a relationship and still wondering whether this is the right person, I would suggest putting your heart aside for a moment and asking three different questions.
We do not just marry a person, but also their worldview, their values and vision of the future
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First, ask yourself what happens to you when you are around this person. Do you feel calm and free to be yourself? Or are you tense, walking on eggshells, trying to please them and constantly anticipating their next reaction?
Sometimes the body understands long before the mind does. There are people whose presence helps us relax and become more ourselves. Around others, we shrink and begin losing ourselves.
Second, ask what happens after a conflict. The issue is not whether you argue, because every couple does, but what the argument leaves behind. Do you come away with greater understanding and trust, or feeling more distant than before? In a healthy relationship, even during disagreement, there is still a basic sense that you are on the same side.
Third, ask yourself what the effort in the relationship feels like. Every relationship takes work, but there is a major difference between effort that strengthens a bond and effort spent simply keeping it from falling apart.
If most of your energy goes toward managing your partner’s moods, avoiding emotional land mines, explaining yourself over and over or simply getting through the relationship, you may be working to survive it rather than deepen it.
There is one more sign, perhaps the most important: Is your partner capable of genuine growth and change, not simply because they fear losing you, but because they truly want to become a better partner?
Can they listen, take responsibility, apologize and make amends? Can they take your perspective seriously, accept criticism without treating it as an attack and stay engaged when the relationship becomes difficult?
Put simply, your partner will sometimes touch your deepest emotional wounds, as happens in any close relationship. What matters is whether they can stay with you and respond with care when those wounds surface.
Ultimately, marriage depends on more than how deeply two people love each other. It also depends on how well their lives fit together. We can fall in love with many people, and sometimes even love someone wrong for us. The right partner is not necessarily the person who makes us feel the most intense emotions, but the one with whom we can build the kind of life we truly want.
Perhaps these are the questions that matter most before marriage: not simply, “How much do I love this person?” but “Do we want to build the same kind of life?” and, just as importantly, “Do I like who I become when I am with them?”
- Roi Tzur is the founder of Derech Hakesher, a center specializing in individual, couples and online therapy