how can you tell if the person you're in a romantic relationship with is the right person to spend the rest of your life with uh you can't you actually decide that rather than discovering it um I might say what I might suggest what you might look for on the way to making that decision All Things Considered a a certain amount of similarity on the personality Dimensions between the two of you is probably um to be recommended if you're if you differ tremendously in trait conscientiousness one of you is going to find the other unbearably rigid orderly and workaholic oriented and that person is going to find you dissolute and undisciplined and those are temperamental differ is and if the Gap is large it's hard to bridge it agreeableness it's the same thing the warmer person will find the colder harsher person um cruel and and um unkind and the cruel and unkind person will find the more agreeable person soft uh a pushover and contemptibly unable to stand up for themselves and the extrovert will want to be out partying all the time and the introvert will have had his or her fill of that very rapidly so you want some temperamental similarity across the major personality Dimensions with the possible exception of trait neuroticism which is the generalized proclivity to experience negative emotion I would suggest that a person high in neuroticism seek out someone low or very low because if first of all neuroticism is one of the best predictors of unhappiness in a relationship and so if you're both high in neuroticism you're very likely to be unhappy in the relationship and it's highly probable that the higher the person who's higher in neuroticism needs the stabilizing influence of someone who's lower so then I would say well this is based on my clinical observations as well as my the experiences of my life I think it's necessary or at least highly desirable that you find the person that you're with sexually attractive and that's somewhat ineffable uh you can be confronted with two people who are by objective standards equally attractive and or perhaps equally unattractive and find yourself very physically attracted to one of them while the other one will leave you cold and that's a deep mystery and I've seen couples try who get along as friends try to bridge that Ro romantic Gap by will and I haven't really seen it be successful so I think you need that spark that ignites sexual passion then you have to ask yourself if you can trust the person if you can if there are activities that you can share with them that would make up a life if you're oriented in approximately the same direction with regard to your goals especially important goals career and children being foremost among them if you think you could come to some agreement about how the economic resources could be distributed or at least how that might be negotiated if you can negotiate with the other person and again if you can trust them and I would say of all those trust is the most crucial component maybe followed by the ability to negotiate the right person is someone you can negotiate with because there's going to be differences between you and them there's going to be differences in your approach there should be hopefully they'll be because that means that the two of you are bringing different skill sets to bear on the problem that's means that you have a more diverse range of potential responses which can be good but also that there's going to be conflict the issue then becomes can you negotiate through the conflicts and will the other person stick to their negotiated solution and then if you find someone like that and they're of approximately the right age and everything else seems to be in order then in some sense they're as good a bet as the next person and life doesn't last forever forever and so there's real reasons to get on with it you have to understand that even in the best relationships the best relationships are predicated on attraction trust and negotiation constant you're constantly negotiating to to maintain the relationship to expand it you don't find the right person in live happily ever after that life is far too complicated for that