How do you find a wonderful spouse without wasting precious time on frogs?

During more than fifteen years of practice as a social worker I’ve been amazed by how much money, time, and energy all of us devote to finding ourselves a spouse or a lifelong partner.

We plod wearily through long lines of losers or just plain unsuitable people, all in the quest for someone who will make us, we hope, deliriously happy.

The problem . . .

Mostly our efforts look hit or miss, from where I sit.  We inspect each person who comes along, we look for “chemistry,” and then we do our best to make the relationship succeed.  If it’s no go with one person, we move on to the next.

An awful lot of the time, though, our efforts bomb out.  After a few weeks or months or even years, the relationship self-destructs.

Here are just a few scenarios:

• Jay is suspicious and relentlessly checks Sam’s cell phone until he gets fed up with protesting his good intentions and his lack of wrongdoing.

• Jean constantly hounds Jan about his feelings and won’t leave him alone when he needs space.

• Sarah makes promises and doesn’t follow through.

• Jill wants commitment but hates to nag.  Loren dodges the issue.  Months go by.

The trouble is, lots of time can pass between the first meeting of would-be partners and the day when they break up, both feeling angry and hurt, both licking their wounds.

Watching the drama play out again and again over more than a decade, I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t a better way.  A way to avoid at least some of the relationship disasters and the pain my clients reported.

Sometimes the people I was seeing were survivors of a bad relationship who were anxiously looking for a new match.  Sometimes I could watch as a new romance rose at the start and crashed at the finish, like a rocket without enough boosters.  In the meantime, there was terrible heartbreak for all concerned.

The causes . . .

The failures aren’t anyone’s fault.  You are not to blame.  The big cosmic joke is that, while we all need partners, most of the time we have no clue how to find them.

We make the mistake of letting ourselves be guided by our experiences in our families of origin, where our parents didn’t always set a good example.  Or we fall prey to the sweet nothings the media shout at us on the subject of love and marriage.

With no more guidance than this, you and I are bound to find ourselves with losers.  To reduce the risk, we need to weed out at least some of the candidates at the start. We need a shorter list.

The question . . .

As a therapist, I asked myself, What would be a foolproof way to reduce the candidate pool to people who at least stood a chance of being right?

And presto! The Identikit was born.  Here’s how the thinking went.

People who are dating in order to marry or settle down expect to live with someone else eventually.

No one can know right off the bat how anyone else will react emotionally to unpredictable future situations, but anyone can find out whether someone else shares enough lifestyle habits for the two of them to live together peaceably.

Everyone likes different things.  Some people sleep on the floor.  Some people eat off paper plates rather than wash dishes.  Some people dance until dawn and then sleep until noon.  Some people are neat freaks.  Some people eat smoked oysters.

What would tell you whether or not someone shared your preferences or was at least okay with them in most areas?  How could we size up two people’s compatibility?

My clients and I created batches of questions in a lot of areas.  We considered virtually everything that any of us might routinely want or might prefer to avoid in daily life.  The list ranged from cell phones to sleep, from relatives to reading matter, from pets to politics.

Once we had our lists, we added a wrinkle.  Knowing that one size would never fit all, we divided each question into two parts.  Part one asked what you liked and how important this preference was to you.  Part two asked you how important it was that your partner be like you in this area.

We added a scoring option so that you could compare different people.  A divorced man might like to compare his present girlfriend with his ex.  Or his ex with his mom.  And so forth.

And we capped the whole thing off with an explanation of our choice of questions.

The answer . . .

We made our survey, now The Ideal Partner Identikit, a tool that you could use in many different ways, for example:

• to identify your own preferences in matters of lifestyle and other areas
• to compare dates or lovers
• as a conversation piece to learn about new acquaintances
• as a starting point for understanding compatibility.

Then, when we had a complete draft, we shared it with couples who had been together for decades.

They told us that the Identikit embodied the wisdom they had acquired during their years together.  Start with compatibility, they said, not with chemistry.

The happily married clients, awesome relationship veterans, assured us that the more you and your spouse have in common,

• the less you are likely to argue about
• the easier you will find it to enjoy daily life together
• the better able you will be to communicate and cooperate
• the more likely your relationship will be to last for a long time.

Now available at a computer near you . . .

The Ideal Partner Identikit, complete at last, has proven wildly popular.  It has helped scores of couples find each other and stay together.

It can help you too.  You can benefit from my clients’ experience and my own.

The Identikit is available as a download and—best of all!—can be scored either on paper or on a special online website, where the math is done automatically for you.  (Just imagine: you could sit at a restaurant and compare scores with your dinner date on your smart phone during your meal!)

The Ideal Partner Identikit can be yours in just a couple of minutes.  To order, simply click on the button.  It sells for $40.  And it’s guaranteed to give you satisfaction.

Why delay?  Order now.  Just click on the button below.

Best regards,

Marcia

P.S.  You’ll find the link to the online version of the Identikit in the introduction to your download.  So go ahead and order now.  Get started finding your ideal partner today.