Somewhere in the world of five billion people there lives the best-looking, richest, smartest, funniest, kindest person who would settle for you. But your dreamboat is a needle in a haystack, and you may die single if you insist on waiting for him or her to show up. Staying single has costs, such as loneliness, childlessness, and playing the dating game with all its awkward drinks and dinners (and sometimes breakfasts). At some point it pays to set up house with the best person you have found so far.
But that calculation leaves your partner vulnerable. The laws of probability say that someday you will meet a more desirable person, and if you are always going for the best you can get, on that day you will dump your partner… If your partner was the most desirable person in the world, he or she would have nothing to worry about, because you would never want to desert. But failing that, the partner would have been foolish to enter the relationship.
I hear from many people who are scared to be absolute in promising themselves to a person (committing) because they worry that if they say that this is it, that out there might be a better opportunity and then they’ll be kicking themselves, even though if they were genuinely committed to someone, they fail to realise that they wouldn’t be looking around because they’d be too busy with the person they’re with.
Wondering if you can do better all the time, is a bit like when you sit down to watch TV but instead of choosing a programme, watching it and engaging in it, you spend the time surfing around on the off chance that there’s something better to watch
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