Our Most Important Research Project
“Love is not a numbers game.” “You don’t find The One. You create The One.” “Raise the freakin’ bar. The men and women will rise up and the boys and girls will fall away.” “Safety in a relationship is the foundation upon which everything good is built.”
These are a few of the thoughts that swirl through my brain lately as I continue to build, research, and test PartnerLab, the dating decision service that is my passion project.
The Goal: to help more people 1) develop loving, lasting romantic partnerships, and 2) avoid the unnecessary heartache and pain that comes from a messy parting of ways or spending our limited time, attention and energy on a relationship that doesn’t serve us.
The Who: This is where I struggle. My gut says that this service is for those who have been in a long-term relationship or marriage that has come to an end, and now they are back on the dating market. The user has experienced that heartache and is determined to approach a romantic relationship differently going forward. However, that may leave out some 20-somethings who have yet to have a longer term relationship. I’m not yet convinced the same tool or service can effectively serve both types of people. More testing to come.
What I am convinced of, and that many may not agree with, is that finding and developing a romantic relationship is best achieved if we treat that pursuit as a research project. By all accounts, it is the most important or impactful research project that we undertake. Hear me out.
There is mounting empirical research and evidence indicating what drives or determines a high quality relationship that lasts. A few of the top drivers are:
Appreciation for one’s partner
A partner’s responsiveness
Our own sexual satisfaction
Lower levels of conflict
One’s perception of a partner’s commitment.
There is beaucoup data out there to help us know what to look for and what to cultivate in order to have that fantastic relationship. Unfortunately, most people don’t have access to that peer-reviewed research or the training to interpret the statistics that tell the story.
That is the goal of PartnerLab - to equip people with the knowledge, skills and abilities to identify a potential relationship partner and then to mindfully and intentionally develop a relationship with that person at a strategic and healthy pace.
Some people will balk at the notion of pursuing a romantic partner with the intentionality and rigor of scientific research, much less the idea of developing hypotheses along those lines. However, how well is it working for us to go with our feelings, hope, wish, and do a rain dance that lead to a happy, healthy relationship? 52% of marriages end in divorce and an additional 10-20% aren’t happy (i.e., pretty miserable) marriages. Those folks are often simply surviving or sticking it out for the kids’ sake. That’s no way to live and not a healthy example for those children (I learned this waaaay too late! It’s my deepest regret in not parting ways with my first spouse earlier).
No other decision has the kind of ripple effect on our lives, happiness and wellbeing as does the partnership decision(s) we make. Why leave that to chance? We research mortgage rates and lenders when buying a home, scour Consumer Reports when searching for a new car, and spend hours, days, weeks and months on Glassdoor and LinkedIn when pursuing a new job or employer. Yet we often turn away from such research efforts or systematic approach when in the dating realm.
Do you know someone who seems to gravitate towards the same kinds of partners or relationships that don’t serve them? “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is the definition of insanity.” is a rather harsh perspective. However, as humans we do go toward the familiar, whether that is similar partners or partners who are familiar based on the family dynamics we grew up in (see the research on attachment styles for more info).
We need to break that cycle and embrace finding and cultivating a romantic partnership with the rigor and intentionality of the most happiness/sadness inducing research project of our lives - our romantic relationships. To take a step toward approaching a romantic relationship as a research project and building your partner in a lab, click here for the onboarding stage of PartnerLab. (Note: if you click via your phone, you’ll download the Storyline Health app, the platform on which PartnerLab is being built. Then you’ll need to click on the above link again to go to the onboarding stage).
I see you,
Merideth