The 2 Biggest Dating Mistakes

The biggest dating mistake I see, year after year, is the search for Mr. or Ms. Right — that one star-crossed lover who will be the answer to all your romantic, marital, and familial needs.

In real estate, it’s often desirable to find a move-in-ready home in your price range.

You might make small, cosmetic adjustments to personalize it, just as you might imagine making only minor adjustments with a life partner to appreciate certain kinds of food and to give up those stupid sweaters.

The image of a turnkey partner, a soulmate, is promulgated by Hollywood and romance novels.

It’s not just the Hollywood storylines, the bride who leaves the wedding to a perfectly acceptable groom for her one true love. It’s also the mystique of Hollywood, the idolatry of celebrities and the spurring of fantasies that one’s life would be complete if one were only married to Johnny Depp or Rosario Dawson (or whoever has replaced them).

In some cultures, actually, marriages are move-in ready, which is why arranged or parent-approved relationships “work” in them. I put work in quotation marks because in such cultures, the definition of what works is usually procreation and maintaining the family unit. Arranged marriages are less likely to work when “work” is defined as self fulfillment, romantic love, and personal closeness.

Nowadays, with all the variability available in our society, one successful marriage may look very different from another one (pace Tolstoy: not all happy families are alike where there is cultural diversity).

Single people have to ask themselves if potential mates are interested in having the same sort of relationship that they are interested in.

There was a time when singles could assume this was true, and all they had to do was to make sure they weren’t being conned by someone claiming to want a marriage who was really after a conquest or a fling or kids or a paycheck or a ring (a marriage in name only).

Trying to find the “Right” person rather than someone you can build a relationship with

My wife and I are looking for a home to buy right now, and the first thing we did was to write down our dealbreakers, our desires, and our price range.

In this analogy, “price range” means an assessment of your own social capital and an assessment of a potential mate’s. You can’t get Rosario Dawson or Johnny Depp unless you have some remarkable social capital.

The analogy breaks down, though, because your home is, well, not alive. It doesn’t have an agenda you have to coordinate with your own. Thus, the biggest dating mistake is trying to find the right person rather than trying to find someone who wants to build the kind of relationship you want to build, someone you want to build it with.

You can talk about this on a date, but you can also keep an eye out for signs that you are heading in different directions. That’s not a dealbreaker; the dealbreaker, if you are looking for true love, is not being able to discuss and resolve differences in what you imagine building together.

Let’s face it: At the heart of the fantasy of meeting Mr. or Ms. Right is the fantasy that you yourself are just right for someone. It’s possible, over time, to become just-enough right for a partner, but the desire to be accepted as perfect just the way you are ensures that you won’t be good at building a working relationship.

It’s like building your dream house and then trying to find someone who wants to live in it, resenting every change they make to it.

The same problem ruins therapy and education, when patients and students want to be validated and affirmed as healthy and expert rather than engaged in a change process. Perfectionism is the enemy of close relationships

Staying in a Relationship You Know Won’t Work

The other big mistake in dating I’ve seen over the years is staying too long in relationships that you know won’t work out. Like I said, we’re looking to buy a house right now, and the whole experience resembles online dating.

You look at the property’s profile, described in glowing terms by the current owner or realtor. You visit all the ones that seem like they would do. I expect we won’t spend more than 20 minutes in most houses we look at. Then you go back, checking out what’s not in the profile that matters to you: Can you walk to a pub? Is it noisy on Saturday nights? Is the neighborhood bustling, chaotic, or sedate? Could you put up the whole family for Thanksgiving? Whatever you think you need from a home.

It wouldn’t be efficient to live in each home you visit for weeks or months before deciding if it was right for you, just because you like the pool at one place and the park across the street in another.

But that’s what a lot of people do when looking for a mate. They’ll spend months in a relationship with a person they know won’t work because they hope the person will become someone who wants (or won’t want) kids or monogamy or whatever is crucial in what you want to build together.

Or they stay for the sex (buy some toys instead), for companionship (make friends), or because they’re uncertain about the other person.

The next thing you know, you’re older than you meant to be for what you were looking for. Instead of building a life with someone, your life has been built, and you’re back to the problem of looking for someone who fits into it. Which is fine in your sixties when you don’t have to fit particularly closely but that maybe wasn’t what you were looking for in your twenties.

To summarize, I’m talking about the dating mistakes made by people looking for a real or primary partnership, even though the desired ingredients of that partnership can vary tremendously from couple to couple regarding monogamy, time together, joint activities, values, cohabitation, and so on.

Real partnerships must be tested early for whether the other person is also looking for a real partner (by addressing and resolving conflicts) and also for whether they want the same essential things for the couple.