How to choose a life partner and make other critical life decisions
“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears” Nelson Mandela
If you are asked, you will always want to have the choice to make decisions pertaining to your life. We all want to have control of our own destiny. However, the reality is that when we have the power to decide, we often struggle as fear takes over — We are gripped with stress and anxiety due to the fear of making a wrong decision and the fear of missing out.
One of the biggest decisions we get to make in our life is the choice of our life partners. I have seen so many youngsters struggling to take the plunge from the fear of making a wrong decision. In this blog post, I will share a decision making framework that I have developed over the years from my experience of needing to make decisions in all aspects of life. We will use the example of life partner to help explain the concepts. However, the framework itself is quite generic and could be applied to all kinds of decisions we make in life.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Identify the “decision”
This seems like an obvious starting point. Well, sometimes it is the obvious that is missed and when it comes to decision making, identifying what decision needs to be made is also not easy. There may be factors interwoven that make it a little complex.
In our example, where the decision that needs to be made is choosing a life partner, there is a lot of introspection needed to ensure you know that you really are looking for a partner. I have repeatedly seen youngsters rejecting potential partners, not because those partners were wrong for them, but because they were simply not ready to marry. So, make sure you are solving the right problem. If you are not ready to marry, going from partner to partner is not going to help you.
Step 2: Bring in Trusted Advisors
One of the biggest mistakes we make is taking “self-reliance” too seriously. We cannot be an “expert” in everything. Thus, find the people in your network with the best expertise for the problem, delegate the problem to them if you can or at least consult them for their advice. Trust their advice — it is generally good to listen to people who are more experienced or have expertise in something
This helps in two additional ways. First: often, there are no absolute wrong decisions. Delegating and trusting someone else can help break the impasse. Second: others, including our close family, are often able to see the situation more objectively than we can.
When it comes to finding a life partner, our parents can share perspective from their own experiences. When it comes to a life partner, we often make forward looking assumptions about what will matter to us in future and such assumptions are often wrong. Trusting our parents and bringing them in as consultants can help us identify those incorrect assumptions.
Step 3: Limit the Options
Too many options is not always good. This is especially true when there isn’t a clear winner. In such cases, it helps to limit the possible options to choose from. Statistically, this makes sense since the sample of options that you choose most likely would be a decent representation of the population. If you make a decision from the sample, it would statistically have a good chance of lying amongst the best possible options in the population itself.
Step 4:Timebox the Decision
This is an important step, especially for those who tend to drag their feet when it comes to critical decision making. Set a deadline and stick to it. Timeboxing ensures that you don’t get stuck in analysis — paralysis mode. This is hard to implement when the deadline is not enforced externally. You can still try to enforce it for yourself. Start by setting a deadline. Then, share it with your near and dear ones as a declaration of your commitment. Write it down somewhere you will be reminded of it regularly. Measure your progress over time. These tricks can help you move forward.
Step 5: Control the Controllable
In life, there is a lot that is outside of our control. Yet, we try to control the uncontrollable. For example, when we are exploring potential partners, we try to assess whether they will get along with our parents. The truth is that we simply can’t predict how an individual or their relationship with others will evolve over time. Look back at your life — have your interests, knowledge, choices and perspective not changed over time?
You can’t ask someone to commit to have a great relationship with your parents when your parents are a stranger to them. You can try your best to assess if they are a kind and fair person, and that too, with some level of uncertainty. Whatever happens in the future will depend not just on them, but also on your parents, you and thousands of other factors that are outside anyone’s control.
Final Thoughts
With every decision you make, there is always a possibility that things could go wrong. Often, imagining and accepting the worst case outcome can put us at ease in moving forward with our decision.
Often, in life, it is better to make a bad decision than to make no decision at all!
