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The ex factor

If humans are meant to mate for life, why do so many of us get it so horribly wrong when it comes to choosing a partner?
Unhappy married couple.

In her early 20s, on her own with three young children, she went looking for security and found it in a rich older man. “Back in those days, a woman couldn’t even buy a house if she didn’t have a husband. It was a way to give myself and my girls a better chance.”

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By the time they eloped to Las Vegas, after nine years together, he was bankrupt and all her savings had gone down with his finance company in the 1987 sharemarket crash. She married him anyway, their wedding bankrolled by a win at the casino. “I was like this little lost kid,” she says. “My parents had died by then. Everything I had was gone. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Number three was a “total rebound” – a registry-office wedding like her first one, and over just as quickly. In the years that followed, Hartley Moore had a few flings, wrote her book Suddenly Single, and finally took her own advice that the wrong relationship is worse than no relationship at all. “When you’re happy in your own skin and with your own company, then you really work out what it is you’re looking for,” she says. “I didn’t need anyone to support me. I didn’t need a man for any of those things. If I got a guy, it was purely for me.”

And that’s how she found her happy ending, when TV producer Steve Butler went down on one knee and proposed. They married in 2008 (the bride wore a cream wedding dress). Yet on paper, it looked an unlikely match.

“I vote National, he votes Labour. He’s a liberal – that’s why he’s in TV. He sees the good in every murderer. But our upbringing, our beliefs, our morals are the same,” says Hartley Moore, who reckons the fact two of her ex-husbands were Catholic caused more entrenched divisions. “Even today, people are hung up on who their kids get together with. There’s this pressure to marry someone who’s perceived as the ‘right’ person – a professional who went to the correct school. But that doesn’t necessarily make for the right marriages. A lot of people know at the altar it’s not the life they thought it was going to be.”

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Despite the wreckage of her first three forever-afters, she sees them not as failures, but learning curves. “We don’t learn how to have relationships; we’re not taught emotional intelligence in school. It’s all IQ, not EQ – knowing who you are and knowing what you want.

“I believe in writing it down. Not a list like ‘six foot two with a great head of hair’, but the kind of person you want. And be realistic. Have a good long look at yourself in the mirror first.”

Julia Hartley Moore.

It’s tempting to read the entrails in hindsight, but when Jennifer Gauvain – author of Why So Many of Us Marry the Wrong Person – surveyed 1000 divorced women, almost a third said they knew they were making a mistake as they walked down the aisle.

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Aside from the embarrassment and expense of calling it off, most went through with it anyway because they thought their partner would change or they were afraid of being alone.

Such errors happen with appalling ease and regularity, claims The Philosophers’ Mail, an online forum set up by a group including UK-based Swiss writer and philosopher Alain de Botton. And no wonder; most of us have so little insight into our own psychological make-up, how can we expect to truly understand someone else?

“Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest and also costliest mistake any one of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary, and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are,” writes the think tank, in a provocative look at the imperfections of modern love.

Potential pitfalls couples face include a misconception that marriage guarantees happiness, the rise of romance over rationality, and a society that makes singledom “dangerously unpleasant”.

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We’re all a peculiar bundle of quirks and flaws, they argue, so perfection isn’t on the cards. The key is finding someone whose neuroses are a foil for your own. In a wiser society, then, prospective partners might put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed by a team of analysts before committing to each other for life. “By 2100, this will no longer sound like a joke. The mystery will be why it took humanity so long to get to this point.”

UK-based writer and philosopher Alain de Botton and wife Charlotte.

According to The Philosophers’ Mail dating manual, a standard question over dinner early in any relationship should be: “How are you mad?” After all, even the act of falling in love itself is a peculiar kind of madness. What happens in our brains has striking similarities with mental illness, according to a BBC report on “The Science of Love”. And we aren’t really smitten at first sight, but at first smell. All sorts of studies involving sweaty T-shirts show we can literally sniff out someone who’s genetically compatible, while both sexes are subconsciously turned on by symmetry, a visual cue for fertility.

US biological anthropologist Helen Fisher claims the human body knows within a split second whether another person is physically attractive to them or not. But when men are looking for a long-term partner, says Cambridge professor David Bainbridge – author of a new book Curvology: The Origins and Power of Female Body Shape – intelligence is far more influential than big boobs and long legs. (Not too much intelligence, perhaps. For every extra $5000 a woman earns over her partner, their risk of divorce apparently goes up by five per cent.)

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Whatever draws us together in the first place, navigating the minefields of marriage has been described as requiring skills that overlap those of a bomb disposal expert. In New Zealand, one in three marriages ends in divorce; in the United States and the UK, that rises to almost half. Fewer of us are tying the knot than ever before – who can afford it, when the average wedding bash costs $30,000? But young romantics don’t seem any more clued-up on choosing a mate for life, even though they don’t have to get married so they can move out of home or have socially sanctioned sex, as their parents or grandparents once did. The highest rate of divorce (including the dissolution of civil unions) is among people in their 20s, who clearly prefer not to live with their mistakes.

There’s even a term for it: the “starter marriage”, where a couple don’t have any children together and break up within five years. Not to be confused with the “non-starter marriage”, which dissolves in less than 12 months – apparently such a phenomenon there’s money to be made from it. One San Diego-based website, Wedding GiftRefund.com, offers an insurance policy that reimburses the cost of your wedding gift if the couple don’t make it to their first anniversary.

At the same time, the number of “silver splitters” separating later in life has hit a record high. In a survey last year by Silversurfers, a lifestyle website for the over-50s, 18 per cent said their biggest regret was marrying the wrong person. With the prospect of another few decades ahead of them once the children have left home, those disgruntled baby boomers aren’t sticking around. And that still doesn’t tell you how many enduring partnerships are harmonious ones.

“People can be married for 30 to 40 years and what they’ve been through is crap,” says Julia Hartley Moore. “Often there’s all this stuff no one knows about. Being together for a long time doesn’t mean [the relationship] is a happy one.”

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Wellington industrial psychologist Keith McGregor, who’s run “communication in marriage” workshops for engaged couples through the Catholic Church, believes a simple failure to listen is often a stumbling block right from the start. “One guy introduced me to his partner and said, ‘I haven’t talked to her for a week – I didn’t want to interrupt,’” he laughs.

He doesn’t do marriage guidance, but says that once someone has decided their relationship is unsalvageable, counselling is pretty much doomed to fail. “It’s easier to see someone else’s flaws than our own – research backs that up. A lot of couples, in order to be happy, expect the other partner to change.”

A specialist in psychometric testing, McGregor developed Selector Professional, an online tool used to assess candidates for senior executive and other strategic appointments. He’s had a few couples do the test, to see how their profiles fit together and work out where their “synergies and separations” are. Using psychological science to assess potential compatibility isn’t a bad idea, he says. “It would certainly give people a head start to know what their ‘madness’ is. With some dating sites, that’s exactly what they try to do.”

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Where arranged marriages are traditionally brokered on similarities in education, profession, family backgrounds and religious beliefs, internet dating throws personality type into the mix. The first computer-matching program dates back to the 1960s, when two Harvard University undergraduates created a questionnaire that could be fed into a punch-card system and then compared to other people’s answers. They called it Operation Match.

These days, it’s a little more sophisticated. EliteSingles, which launched here in 2013, has millions of members worldwide and employs a team of specialists in maths, IT and psychology. Couples looking for long-term relationships are matched through a complex personality test that calculates levels of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

No such fancy algorithms were in play on The Bachelor. Executive producer Anna Lynch relied on “gut instinct” to cull hundreds of candidates prepared to risk public humiliation for the sake of a rose. She reckons modern matchmaking shows have a better hit rate than randomly meeting someone in a bar.

“The ultimate aim is to end up with a couple in love, but they’re human beings, so it’s a crap shoot,” she says. “Matching perfect with perfect isn’t necessarily going to give you the best match. There were definitely some instant connections made that I could not have foreseen.”

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New Zealand has the most acute shortage of men aged 25-49 in the world, according to a recent analysis of OECD data by social and economic researcher Paul Callister. However, Lynch says it wasn’t the “man drought” but a lack of fidelity that emerged as a common thread among the women’s application forms. “Time and time again they’d been cheated on. It’s not so much that it’s hard to meet someone, but it’s hard to meet someone loving and faithful. Everyone is just looking for one that isn’t a dick!”

In reality, we’re not even close to being able to make a definitive call on which two people will be the right fit, says Associate Professor Nathan Consedine, who’s director of the Health Psychology Program at Auckland University.

“We don’t even really know why people marry. But having the same ideas about what the hell life is for, that’s going to be a huge predictor. People change, but if you’re set up right to begin with, you might grow together rather than apart.”

Compared to the days when we paired off within tribes, the pool of potential partners seems so vast it’s become a source of discontent, says Consedine. That’s known as the “choice paradox”, where we end up obsessing about what we might be missing out on, rather than being satisfied with what we have.

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“This expectation you’ll be happy, which permeates the West, is a complete and utter fraud. Good marriages take effort and work. Most marriages are mundane most of the time. But we’re not socialised to expect that,” he says. “Everything is supposed to be interesting, exciting, dramatic, thrilling, fulfilling, soul-searing, let’s have spontaneous sex on the beach while the waves crash over us…

“So our expectations are continually being disappointed and the opportunities to go off and get it somewhere else are greater than ever before.”

Auckland psychotherapist Lynne Dunphy, who does a lot of work with couples, thinks cross-cultural courtships and connections made through the internet have put relationships under even more pressure, and often there’s little outside support from far-flung families. “In the days when you met so-and-so from down the road, you knew what you were getting into. And people do walk away more quickly now. We’re still not encouraged to talk about feelings; that code of staunchness does everyone a disservice.”

One of the crunchiest times for couples is the birth of their first baby. Another lumpy patch is when the children leave home. By the time most people come to therapy, it’s six or seven years too late and the damage is done.

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“The biggest thing is being open and available to each other,” Dunphy says. “Often people marry because of timing. It’s the right person, at the right time. Then suddenly here you are, 20 years later. At best, you’ve learnt to accept each other’s foibles. At worst, everything becomes further evidence you shouldn’t be together.”

Otago University student Roisin Hegarty, who’s doing a PhD in psychology, has been single for a year since breaking up with her long-term boyfriend. The 27-year-old, who explores ideas about happiness in her “Yellow Brick Blog”, admits her generation doesn’t seem any better at making the transition from lust to a lasting partnership. “Apparently there’s a man drought in Dunedin,” she says. “I’m in this age gap where there are no suitable men; that’s what I’ve heard. But sometimes I wonder if the idea of pairing up and having a lifelong monogamous relationship is actually a helpful concept. For some people I know, it certainly isn’t.”

Hegarty has seen people “freak out” when they hit a certain age and rush into relationships because they want to have children or don’t want to be alone. “It all comes back to this whole idea that’s promoted in pop music and movies and those ridiculous romance novels, where you’re madly in love all the time, which is completely insane,” she says.

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“But I still have this romantic idea that one day I’ll be in the library or a bookshop, and a man will come up to me and start talking about books. And that will be the end of it. I think that’s ludicrous, but who knows? It could happen.”

Two hundred invitations had already been posted out when Esther Henry called off her country-church wedding. She was 24 and her parents were furious, but all her instincts told her she was on the verge of making a mistake she’d regret for life.

“I felt terrible about the whole thing, but he’d become weirdly possessive and the closer we got to the wedding, the more I thought it felt scarily wrong,” she says.

“I lost the deposit on my wedding dress, but as soon as I’d made the decision, I just felt so relieved. It was definitely the right thing to do.”

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A few years later, Esther’s brother played matchmaker and set her up with one of his mates. She and Chris, who live in Kaikoura, have five children, including one with Down syndrome, and are about to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. But when their eldest was a teenager, work and family pressures placed their marriage under such stress they lived apart for several years before eventually reconciling.

At their daughter’s 21st birthday party, it was referred to as “when mum and dad were having their troubles”. Esther looks back on that nightmarish time as the worst period of her life. Again, her instincts pulled her through – this time, telling her she and Chris shared something valuable that was worth fighting to save. “Both of us had other relationships during that time, but nothing was at all right,” she says. “We’re older and stronger now – it’s like we were never apart.”

Although she and Chris are quite different in many ways – “he’s incredibly messy and I’m organised; he loves hunting and going on great adventures” – they’re bound by fundamental similarities, too. “We’ve never had arguments about how to bring up the children; we think exactly the same way on what is the right or wrong thing to do and what the limits are. In the end, it’s about someone who gets you and knows what you’re thinking. We are each other’s person in life.”

As a species, it seems we’re endlessly optimistic about love. In New Zealand, about a third of all weddings are re-marriages, which have an even higher failure rate, as if doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

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Kathy, a Wellington designer, had bought a house with her partner and was making wedding plans when she realised with a shock their relationship had become an “action replay” of the problems that caused her first marriage to fail. “It was scary seeing similar traits in him to my first husband,” she admits. “I felt I couldn’t get through to him and I know he felt at the time that I was a bit of an emotional tidal wave. I’d started to convince myself he wasn’t right for me; that we couldn’t possibly be together and be happy.”

So they went to couples therapy, before getting wed, and while it didn’t resolve all their differences, Kathy says it gave them a fresh perspective and allowed them to focus on the values they did share. They’ve been happily married – with all the inevitable blips and bumps – for more than 20 years.

While it might seem there’s a world of lovers to choose from, perhaps that’s an illusion, when really we’re all at the mercy of biology, psychology and happenstance. Kathy has her own philosophy on that. She reckons our taste in partners is like the style of watch we like to wear.

“Once you’ve decided on your type, you choose it over and over again,” she says. “But you have to get the recipe right. You can love carrot cake, but too much baking soda is disgusting. The right amount is wonderful.”

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Words by: Joanna Wane

Photos: Ken Downie and Getty Images

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