Choosing a long-term partner may be the single most consequential decision that any of us ever has to make.
No wonder we can get a little scared on dates.
If we get the choice right, we may enjoy supportiveness, cosiness and intimacy for the rest of our lives.
If we get it wrong, our confidence, health, financial wherewithal and sanity will be on the line.
England's greatest novelist, Jane Austen, spent her career writing almost exclusively about her character's quest to locate a suitable mate.
As critics have pointed out, in the world outside her study, Britain was fighting a war of survival against Napoleonic France.
But Austen never saw fit to mention the conflict even once.
So busy was she telling us about who blushed on seeing whom at which party.
One might smirk, but her priorities may have been correct.
War is indeed a very serious matter.
Choosing a partner is a properly monumental one.
What then are some of the most weighty mistakes we make when attempting to find a lover?
Firstly, our terror of loneliness.
Much of the reason for our unhappy romantic lives comes down to our dread of the single state.
So terrified are we of our own company and of the persistent humiliations of the dating rigmarole, we become fatefully generous towards mediocre partners who may, over time, end up making us feel far lonelier and more miserable than if we were merely on our own.
The single greatest guarantor of contented love is a capacity to endure one's own company.
Secondly, the sunk cost fallacy.
We stay because we've already been here for so long, because it's already far too late, given that we're 21 or 39 or 104.
We think relentlessly of the three months, five years or two decades that we've already spent with a person, with all the hope implied, and thereby overlook that a short, happy future is always worth more than a lengthy, fractious past.
We forget too that though people may occasionally change, they seem never to do so when one politely asks them to.
Thirdly, muddled assumptions of better alternatives.
Of course, they are a bit awful.
The question is whether one is dealing with an especially obtuse sort or just another member of our collectively maddening species.
We are always choosing from a pool and we need, to a maximal extent, to know what other kinds of creatures swim in it.
Our level of calm years from now is going to depend on having built up, through experience, a fair and robust sense of what an acceptable degree of frustration might be.
Anyone can find someone annoying.
The true skill is to have determined the relative inevitability of their vexatiousness, to know how to distinguish hysterical misery from normal, unavoidable unhappiness.
A hatred of love.
We may spend a great many years pushing away anyone with the gall to try to love us.
Our repulsion tends to have its roots in difficult childhoods, in which we built up an association between intimacy on the one hand and pain on the other, between closeness and suffering.
We now suspect that anyone who is sweet must be deluded for identifying in us a lovability that we don't recognise in ourselves.
Happy love may be what we crave, it isn't necessarily what we can remotely tolerate.
Fifthly, the appeal of madness.
It can take a long time to develop immunity to the appeal of those who blow hot and cold, hate themselves, refuse our affections, deceive us and fall into rages and despair late at night.
We may be deep into middle age before we cotton on to the extraordinary merits and subtle exoticism of the sane reliable, boring people who trust others, go to psychotherapy garden like themselves and love their parents.
The tragedies of defensiveness.
It's the character trait that single-handedly dooms more relationships than any other and means that when one gently raises a complaint against a partner, they reply that this isn't a good time, that it's one's own fault, that there's in fact no problem, that one's being mean and that this is all too much.
It's a blessed day when one lands on a human who, thanks to the love of early caregivers, utters the magic words How interesting.
I hear you.
You might have a point.
Let me have a think about what you're saying.
Underestimating the cumulative impact of character flaws.
We tell ourselves that it's only a little thing, just a small tendency in them to do X or Y or Z.
Then again, a pebble is also only a very small thing.
But if we have one in our shoe and we're running a marathon, after a mile our foot's going to be soaked in blood.
Eighthly, underestimating physical attraction.
It's a criterion that clever people like us are especially prone to neglecting.
Surely sexual appeal shouldn't detain us for too long when choosing a mate.
Surely there are more important things to think at length about than who might be submissive or who dominant.
But this is to overlook how many arguments are at heart about a resentment over absent sex and conversely, how much one can forgive a mate after a satisfying 20 minutes together.
Given that sex is, unlike good conversation or advice, typically the only thing that we're not legitimately allowed to seek outside a couple, we should make sure that the kind we're having in it is uncommonly satisfying.
9.
Perfectionism.
Our chances of making a good enough choice increase the more we recognise the impossibility of making a perfect one.
Our marriages improve, as we concede that we will naturally inevitably marry slightly the wrong person, but only because there's no such thing as the fully right sort.
Gods can marry paragons.
We're fated to have to cope with just another demented sweet, silly fool.
Much like us, the most contented marriages rest on a bed of consoling forgiving gentle, laughter-filled pessimism.
