I have a sense, however, that in your case, you are simply being choosy, not picky. You are holding out for the kind of person you truly want to spend the rest of your life with, one with whom you are highly compatible in all the important areas of your life. I talk about ten areas of compatibility that you should look for in a mate:
1) Physical style: appearance, personal fitness, and eating habits, etc.
2) Emotional style: attitude toward relationships and affection, ability to express feelings
3) Social style: personality traits, how he interacts with others
4) Intellectual style: educational background, attitude toward learning, creative expressions, cultural experience
5) Sexual style: sexual experience and skill, ability to enjoy sex, attitude
6) Communication style: how he communicates, attitude toward communication
7) Professional/Financial style: relationship with money, attitude toward success, work and organizational habits
8) Personal Growth style: attitude toward self-improvement, willingness to work on relationship, ability to change self
9) Spiritual style: attitude toward Higher Power, spiritual practices, philosophy of life, moral views
10) Hobbies and interests
You don’t have to have total compatibility in all these areas, but in the ones that are most important to you, you should have very strong compatibility. (For an extensive discussion of compatibility and how to determine it, pick up my book “Are You the One for Me?”)
The truth is, I wish more people were as “choosy” as you. There would be fewer divorces and dysfunctional relationships. So don’t let yourself be pressured by your family or friends to compromise what you know in your heart is important. And don’t give in to the artificially manufactured social timeclock that says you “must” be married before a certain age. Remember, your soul mate is waiting for you out there. He (or she) doesn’t want you to give up looking before you find him. “Hang in there!” he’s whispering. And when you find him, I know it will have been worth the wait, and you won’t care how long it took.
18 Can long-distance relationships work?
Last year I met a wonderful man at a friend’s wedding, and we’ve been having a relationship ever since. The problem is that we live in two different parts of the country, two thousand miles away from each other. Does our relationship have a chance? How can we keep it working when we are so far apart?
There are three major problems in long-distance relationships:
1) You don’t get to see what your partner is really like.
You know that if you have three days to spend with your lover, you are going to be on your best behavior and so is he. It’s easy to hide the difficult parts of your personality for seventy-two hours, and leave feeling wonderful. But you never really get to know one another, because you don’t see your mate under pressure, in a crisis, when he is ill, when he is frightened. All of these situations reveal a lot about someone’s character, an essential part of determining compatibility. You need consistent time to discover these dimensions of a person.
2) You avoid dealing with problem areas.
Let’s imagine that you haven’t seen your long-distance lover in two months, and he’s flown in to spend the weekend with you. Over dinner that night, he says something that annoys you. Now you have to make a decision: Do you confront him on what is upsetting you, and risk ruining your weekend, or do you forget about it? Most people choose to avoid the confrontation, fearful that by the time they get through the argument and hurt feelings, half of the weekend will already be over. The problem with this habit is that you and your partner never learn to problem solve together, or advance the relationship to deeper levels of communication and harmony. The unresolved issues and the unexpressed resentments just sit there like Emotional Time Bombs, waiting to explode. It may look like you have a great relationship on the surface, but you haven’t allowed it to move through the transition stage every healthy love affair must experience.
3) You have an unrealistic view of your compatibility.
Long-distance lovers often don’t even know how little they have in common because they are too busy entertaining themselves. If you only have three days with your partner, you will treat it like a mini-vacation—you’ll spend all your time together; you’ll go out to restaurants, movies, shows, etc.; you’ll have lots of sex; and you’ll avoid friends and family. This gives you a very unrealistic picture of your relationship. You may actually enjoy the excitement of the fun weekend more than you enjoy your partner and not even know it. Many couples find themselves extremely disappointed when they finally move to the same city or decide to live together. “It doesn’t feel like it used to,” they often complain. Of course if doesn’t. It’s not a twenty-four-hour-a-day party anymore. It’s a real full-time relationship, and if you and your partner aren’t truly compatible, you’ll find out real fast.
For a long-distance romance to evolve into a healthy, lasting relationship, both partners will eventually have to live in the same place. That’s the only way you can truly know if you are compatible, and develop the level of intimacy you need to sustain your love. But while you’re still apart, the most successful long-distance affairs are those in which the couple treats the relationship like it is a full-time romance. So:
Don’t try to make every moment together special, but do normal things together
Don’t try to hide difficult parts of your personalities, but be yourselves
Don’t edit how you feel, but allow yourselves to communicate honestly and deal with conflicts as they come up.
19 How important are cultural differences in a relationship?
My fiancée and I are from very different cultural backgrounds—hers is much more traditional and strict, socially and spiritually, than mine as an American. We’ve always told ourselves that our love was more important than where we were born, but we’re starting to run into some very big problems as we discuss wedding plans, having children, and other serious issues. Am I making a mistake in telling myself the differences don’t matter?