Most people, trying to decide whether to get serious with someone, ask whether their partner is the right person. The question feels like the important one. It is also the wrong one, or at least the secondary one. The primary one is about the person doing the asking. The qualities in your partner that first drew you in are usually the same qualities you eventually try to suppress in them, because they’re the same qualities you suppressed in yourself a long time ago. The variable in your dating life has never been the partner. This essay is about what it has been.

When successful people sit down to write what they want in a partner, they usually produce something closer to a job description than a portrait of someone to live with. The list reads like a spec because that is what it is, and the spec is doing a job for the writer rather than describing an actual person. The job is settling an old question about whether you are enough. No partner can settle that question. This essay is about what to do instead.