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In fact, we should be looking for that at 25, so we don’t marry the guy at 25 and realize at 35 that he doesn’t have qualities that are essential in a good marriage.
“I’d give the same advice to a twenty-five-year-old that I’m giving you,” she said. “But the twenty-five-year-olds don’t want to listen.”
SELFLESSNESS AND HUMILITY
The advice Greenwald gives is simple: Knock off anything as a deal-breaker that’s “objective” (age, height, where he went to college, what type of job he has, how much hair he has, whether he has kids or an ex-wife) and focus on what’s “subjective” (maturity, kindness, sense of humor, sensitivity, ability to commit).
I told her that was easy for her to say—after all, she got married seventeen years ago, when she was 28. How would she feel now, if she were still single in her forties, and someone told her not to pay attention to these objective criteria?
Greenwald laughed at this, but only because she’d been there. She said she almost didn’t meet her husband because she’d also been too hung up on objective criteria. Back in business school, she’d spoken to her husband on the phone in a professional context and enjoyed those conversations, but once she looked up his photo in a directory (and wasn’t impressed), she ruled him out as a romantic prospect. It was only on meeting him at a party and getting to know him that she started to find him cute—and more.
“When I was looking and single,” she said, “I wanted everything! I wanted tall, good-looking, smart, funny. I was so specific, I even wanted curly hair.” And while she got some (but not all) of what she wanted, she’s quick to point out that none of that has to do with her happiness in her marriage.
“When I was dating, two qualities that never occurred to me as important but that turned out to be critical in our marriage were selflessness and humility,” she explained. “A ton of times on a daily basis in marriage, you have to decide whether to maximize your happiness or the other person’s, and my husband has proved so often to maximize my happiness. In courtship, we mistake romance for selflessness, but it’s not at all the same thing. Romantic gestures like sending flowers aren’t the same thing as waking up in the middle of the night and taking care of the baby so I can sleep.”
“Also,” she continued, “humility is key—the ability to say it doesn’t really matter who’s right or wrong, and it’s okay to have different opinions about things. So I ask people, where on your list do you rank selflessness and humility when you’re rejecting a guy based on his age or height?”
In fact, John Gottman, a well-known marriage researcher at the University of Washington and author of the bestseller The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, has shown that he can predict marital success with 91 percent accuracy by looking at basic qualities like compromise, tolerance, and communication style.
Greenwald isn’t discounting the desires many of us have. She’s saying, instead, that while we’d like “everything” in a guy, we should reexamine our standards—and early on—if we want to find the right partner before it becomes increasingly harder to find him.
When she meets women over 35 and takes their romantic histories, she told me, it’s often some variation on I was in this failed relationship for three years, another for five years.
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