Tips for Finding Good Lovers
Image: Nathan Dumlao
What traits make a good partner?
Say you were to write down a list of all the things you wanted in a partner. We’ll leave out sexual compatibility; I mean the traits that make for a good romantic connection beyond sex.
With sex as a given, what else would you look for? Someone who is proud to have you, scared to lose you, willing to fight for you, someone who appreciates you, respects you, cares for you and loves you unconditionally?
I’ve seen that list of traits online, and I'm not sure it’s really a good one. Someone who is proud to have you? Yes. Scared to lose you? No. Willing to fight for you? Maybe. Appreciates you, respects you, and cares for you? Yes. Loves you unconditionally? Hell no.
Why? Well, let’s take it from the top.
Yes, it’s definitely better to be with a partner who’s proud to be with you than one who’s ashamed to be with you or who has contempt for you.
The Gottman Institute is a relationship research organization that claims to be able to predict with greater than 95% accuracy whether a couple in couples counseling is headed for divorce.
They’ve identified what they call the “four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse,”1 four dynamics in a relationship that absolutely doom it. Now, I do see some problems with their approach and I think there are more than four harbingers of a relationship explosion, but one of their four horsemen is “contempt.”
If you treat your partner with contempt, which absolutely includes acting like you aren’t proud to be with them, yeah. You’re in trouble.
No, being with someone who is “scared to lose you” suuuucks.
That fear is corrosive. It poisons everything it touches. People who are constantly in fear of losing you act out. They engage in what psychologists call “protest behavior.” They become controlling and possessive.
A partner who thinks you add value to their life and who prefers a life with you in it to a life without you? Yeah, that’s awesome. A partner who is “scared to lose you”? People who are scared to lose someone frequently, and I mean frequently, act in ways that drive their partner away. If you have an insecure partner, it doesn’t take long for that relationship to become fucking exhausting.
Give me someone who says “I really like being with you because you make my life better, but I would still be okay without you” over someone who’s like “OMG OMG I can’t lose you I just can’t” every time.
Whether it’s good to be with someone who “fights for you” depends pretty specifically on what “fights for you” means.
Someone who values the relationship and wants it to continue? Hell yeah. Someone who stalks you or tries to force you to continue to engage with them when it’s over? Hell no. (And yes, many stalkers live in a twisted reality where what they’re doing isn’t stalking, it’s “fighting for the one they love.”)
Good relationship rule of thumb: If your version of “fighting for the relationship” involves, in ANY way, overriding your partner’s agency, desires, or self determinism, it’s toxic.
Appreciation, respect, and care are baseline requirements for a good relationship.
I feel like this probably doesn’t need a lot of elaboration, except perhaps to say that “respect” can be a slippery word. Sometimes people will say “respect” when they mean “treating with compassion and consideration,” and sometimes people will say “respect” when they mean “you will respect my authority.”
As long as we’re talking about the first kind of respect, yes, of course. If your partner believes “respect” means “obedience,” look out.
Unconditional love is a pathology.
If someone loves you absolutely unconditionally, including loving you even if you mistreat them, that’s not love, it’s codependence. Yes, I said it.
But there’s something else, something I think is just as important as love, appreciation, respect, kindness, and all the other things you may want, something that is useful in any relationship but particularly vital in polyamorous relationships: a trait one of my lovers refers to as being self-entertaining.
I’ve written about the idea of being self-entertaining in depth here. The quick synopsis: A self-entertaining person is someone whose happiness does not fundamentally depend on being with the one they love all the time. Such a person can be happy alone; relationships add to their joy but are not vital to it. A self-entertaining person can lead a happy, fulfilling life even when apart from you.
This more than almost anything else is, in my experience, the key factor to whether or not a person makes a good partner. I’m not saying that we don’t need other people, or we don’t need love and support; only that when someone else cannot be happy apart from you, becoming solely responsible for their happiness quickly gets exhausting, and in practical ways will always limit and constrain any other relationships you may have.
1 I personally believe there are more than four horsemen that signal impending relationship doom, though that’s a whole ’nother essay.