There are lots of people you can love, but only a few you can make a life with. –Esther Perel

When I was 22, I went to a women’s retreat where the leader of us “younger women” encouraged us all to make a list of qualities we wanted in a future husband. I know, I know, some of your eyes are rolling into the very back of your heads, but stick with me. She had made a list a few years prior and then poof! Her future husband appeared and fulfilled all the things she had written down. So, we obediently sat down and wrote out lists. I think I kept mine for a good part of my 20’s.

Around the same time, an older, married friend of mine told me something I’ll never forget: “Rachel, you think you know what you want, but you don’t know what you need. Eventually though, what you need will become what you want.”

He was so right. In my 20’s, I had no idea what I needed. I thought I knew what I wanted, but even that changed with each new relationship I entered into. And more than once, I met someone who was “good on paper.” They had the right looks and hobbies and education and ambition. But it turned out they weren’t right for me long-term so those relationships either ended or failed to really launch in the first place.

Fast forward to my current state of dating – which really, is just a current state of learning – and I’m realizing that good-on-paper is in no way a good predictor of connection or chemistry. I recently dated someone who was the opposite of good on paper. He didn’t meet most of the criteria that I would normally have put on a list and yet, he was sweet and affectionate, interesting, knew himself deeply, was confident, and liked who he was. And I was attracted to all of that while none of the other qualifications on my former list that he didn’t possess seemed to matter. Go figure.

Admittedly, I have more than one friend who has similar stories to that retreat leader, so I can’t discount the whole list thing entirely. But I also think it’s dangerous to have such a narrow view of our ideal person.

There are hundreds of qualities we will need from a partner throughout our life, and together, we will have to ebb and flow into different versions of ourselves to be who the other needs at the time. We can’t possibly predict what those needs will be 5, 10, 15 years from now, years before we become our future selves.

I like how Christian ethicist Lewis Smedes describes this phenomenon in his article, Controlling the Unpredictable: The Power of Promising:

When I married my wife, I had hardly a smidgen of sense for what I was getting into with her. How could I know how much she would change over 25 years? How could I know how much I would change? My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed—and each of the five has been me. The connecting link with my old self has always been the memory of the name I took on back there: “I am he who will be there with you.”//

So instead of looking for our ideal-on-paper person, it might be wiser to take note of our ideal-in-person person. He or she might be in our circles already. Or online. Or just a friend of a friend away. Regardless, we should be clear on our must have’s – shared values, similar world views, and ideally some common interests. And maybe everything else should be held loosely, open to new experiences and learnings. So as we go forth and date, may we find both what we want and what we need.

[Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash]