Ideal Partner Selection: Evidence-Based Relationship Advice

Introduction: Questioning Popular Romantic Advice

The Huffington Post once published an article describing a surgeon's criteria for his version of an ideal woman (Bahadur, 2013). The list included items such as urban experience, a Type B personality, being very thin (described as anorexic), good values, extensive travel experience, a college education, above-average but not exceptional attractiveness, altruism, and extreme gregariousness. On the other end of the spectrum, Oprah.com features advice from Maria Forleo urging women to practice mindfulness as a way to become irresistible to all men (Oprah.com, n.d.). With divorce rates near the 50% level (Carlson & Meyer, 2014), such advice deserves to be challenged by hard reality before the authors do more damage than good. The following essay provides an evidence-based justification for a self-help relationship guide, helping would-be romantic partners separate the bad advice from the good.

The Hard Reality of Modern Intimate Relationships

Nearly half of all marriages during the first decades of the new millennium will end in divorce or permanent separation (Carlson & Meyer, 2014). The prevalence of cohabitation continues to increase, with 68% of all women between the ages of 15 and 44 choosing cohabitation rather than marriage for their first long-term partner relationship. Consistent with this trend, nearly 41% of all births are now extramarital.

As Carlson and Meyer (2014) discuss, rising rates of cohabitation, divorce, permanent separation, and remarriage — in the absence of a comparable decline in fertility rates — have led to an increase in the relational complexity of today's families. While there can be advantages to a more complex family structure, including greater financial and social support resources, the most common outcome is increased poverty and child neglect. The financial and supportive resources that become concentrated in a more traditional family structure are instead diluted by an increase in relational complexity and instability.

The Ideal Standards Model: An Evidence-Based Remedy

The Ideal Standards Model (ISM) may provide a hedge against increased relationship instability and the growing problem of family complexity. This model assumes that most, if not all, people use a set of ideal standards for evaluating whether a person could be a viable long-term intimate partner (Fletcher & Simpson, 2000). The model's foundation rests on three components: perceptions of self, partner, and relationship. The authors propose that a potential intimate partner should be evaluated using any of the following three dimensions: (1) warmth, commitment, and intimacy; (2) health, passion, and attractiveness; and (3) status and resources. The goal of applying these three somewhat independent dimensions is to increase the chances of reproductive success and emotional, social, and economic security.

While it may seem desirable to evaluate prospective intimate partners using all three dimensions simultaneously, Fletcher and Simpson (2000) warn that finding and keeping a person who fulfills all three dimensions would be a fool's errand for the vast majority of people, if only because most people would fail to meet anyone's ideal standards on every dimension.

The magnitude of the discrepancy between ideal standards and how closely a partner matches those standards has been shown empirically to influence the success of intimate partnerships (reviewed by Lackenbauer & Campbell, 2012). In other words, the greater the discrepancy, the more likely the relationship will fail and contribute to family complexity. Flexibility, on the other hand, represents the difference between a maximally fulfilled ideal standard and the minimum acceptable level for that standard (Tran, Simpson, & Fletcher, 2008, p. 489).

Conclusion

With divorce rates hovering around the 50% level, cohabitation becoming the preferred structure for intimate partner relationships, and negative emotional and financial outcomes associated with increased family complexity, anyone searching for a life partner would do better to heed the advice of social scientists. The only alternative is the loud cacophony of romantic advice polluting many communication channels, which likely contributes directly to the adverse social trends described above. Logic dictates that an evidence-based approach maximizes the chances of relationship success, and a strong candidate for that approach is the well-characterized and empirically supported Ideal Standards Model.