How to tell if someone is right for you

If the spark can’t be trusted, and the checklist of qualities on paper never quite captures it, how do you tell whether a particular person is right for you? It’s the question underneath all the others, and the honest answer is that you don’t tell from the intensity of the beginning. You tell from a small number of quieter things that reveal themselves over time, and once you know what to look for, they aren’t hard to see. I want to give you the ones that matter, the signals I would pay attention to if I were in your position.

Who you become around them

The first and most telling has nothing to do with them, exactly, and everything to do with you. Notice who you become when you’re with this person. Do you become more yourself, more relaxed, more able to say what you think, freer? Or do you become smaller, more careful, more anxious, more managed, someone editing themselves to keep the peace? The right person tends to expand you. The wrong one tends to shrink you. And the reason this signal is so useful is that you have direct access to it, because it’s about your own state, not a guess about theirs. You don’t have to figure out whether they’re good. You only have to notice whether you get bigger or smaller in their presence, and that you can feel.

How they handle conflict and repair

Everyone is wonderful at the start. What you want to see is what happens the first time you disagree, or disappoint each other, or one of you gets hurt, because you will, and how they behave in that moment tells you more about a life with them than a hundred good evenings. Do they fight fair, or do they go for the throat? Can they say sorry, cleanly, without a hundred conditions? Can they hear that they hurt you without either collapsing into their own shame or turning it around to attack you? A shared life isn’t the absence of rupture. It’s a long, endless sequence of small ruptures and repairs, and repair is the actual skill that determines whether love survives. Someone who can’t repair will be exhausting to love no matter how charming they’re between the fights.

Whether they’re kind when it costs them

Anyone is kind when kindness is free and makes them look good. What you’re watching for is kindness that costs something. How do they treat the waiter, the person who can do nothing for them, the people it would be easy to be careless with? How do they treat you when you’re sick, or difficult, or need something genuinely inconvenient at a bad time? Kindness that holds up when it’s expensive is character. Kindness that only appears when it’s easy or observed is performance, and performance doesn’t last, because eventually life gets hard and the audience goes home.

Whether you can be fully honest with them

Ask yourself whether there’s a version of yourself you have to hide in order to keep this person. Do you find yourself performing, managing their image of you, keeping certain thoughts or needs or parts of your history in the dark? The right person is someone in front of whom you can, over time, put the whole of yourself, the unflattering parts included, and still be met and still be loved. If you have to keep a part of yourself hidden to hold onto them, then they aren’t holding onto you, only onto the version you’re willing to show, and that’s a lonely thing to sign up for, no matter how good the rest of it looks.

The honest word on settling

None of this means holding out for a flawless person, because there isn’t one, and the fear of settling can become its own trap, a way of finding the disqualifying flaw in everyone so that no one is ever enough and you never have to risk choosing. So let me draw the line clearly. Settling isn’t choosing an imperfect person. Every person is imperfect, and a real relationship is two flawed people choosing each other anyway. Settling is choosing someone who fails you on the things that matter, someone who shrinks you, or can’t repair, or is unkind when it counts, or in front of whom you can never be fully real, and then talking yourself into it because you’re afraid of being alone. The difference between a wise choice and settling isn’t how perfect the person is. It’s whether their imperfections are the survivable kind or the fatal kind, and the four things above are how you tell one from the other. Learning to read them, and to trust what you read even when the fear of being alone is loud, is a great deal of what I help people with.