#277: What to Look For in a Long-Term Partner
Choosing who you want to build a life with is one of the biggest decisions you’ll ever make.
And if you experience relationship anxiety, anxious attachment, or fearful-avoidant attachment, that decision can feel especially high stakes. You might feel deeply attached to someone while simultaneously experiencing doubt, fear, and endless questions about whether they’re really the right person for you.
Rather than trying to find a perfect formula for choosing a life partner, it can be more helpful to have a set of guiding principles to come back to.
Whether you’re currently in a relationship and wondering if this is someone you want to commit to long-term, or you’re single and thinking about what you want in a future partner, here are six important things to consider.
1. Do You Respect and Admire Each Other?
Respect and admiration should be foundational in a long-term relationship.
Ask yourself: Do I genuinely respect this person? Do I admire who they are and how they move through the world? And do I feel that same respect and admiration coming back toward me?
It might sound obvious, but plenty of people stay in relationships where they fundamentally disapprove of their partner. They may spend enormous amounts of energy criticising them, trying to change them, or wishing they were different.
It’s very difficult to build a healthy life with someone you don’t respect.
That doesn’t mean you need to think your partner is perfect. But you should be able to look at them and see someone of character and integrity — someone you feel proud to be with.
When respect and admiration are missing, that tends to trickle into every other part of the relationship.
2. Can You Trust Each Other?
We can’t have emotional safety without trust.
And trust is about much more than whether someone tells the truth.
Trust is built gradually through experiences of trustworthiness. Someone says they’re going to do something, and they do it. They keep their word. They show up when you need them. They can hear something vulnerable without shutting down, blowing up, or becoming defensive. When they make a mistake, they’re able to acknowledge it and apologise.
Over time, those moments build a deeper knowing:
This is someone I can depend on.
If your relationship has experienced breaches of trust, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s beyond repair. But repairing those ruptures needs to be prioritised.
Building a life with someone you fundamentally don’t trust — or someone with whom you don’t feel emotionally safe — makes everything else much harder.
3. Do You Actually Enjoy Being Together?
This one is simple but incredibly important:
Do you like being around each other?
Do you laugh together? Have fun? Enjoy sharing the little details of your day? Is there a genuine friendship underneath the romantic relationship?
Warmth, friendship, lightness and play are incredibly nourishing for a relationship.
Of course, life won’t always feel light. There will be stressful seasons, difficult conversations, responsibilities and challenges. But if your relationship is only logistical, pragmatic, serious or intense, that can be difficult to sustain over the long term.
Those small moments of connection matter.
Laughing together. Sharing something you’re excited about. Enjoying an ordinary evening at home. Feeling like your partner is also your friend.
That goodwill helps create a strong foundation for navigating the harder parts of life together.
4. Are Your Visions for the Future Compatible?
You don’t need to agree on absolutely everything, but you should have broadly compatible ideas about the life you want to create.
This becomes particularly important when it comes to the bigger, more binary decisions:
Do you want to get married?
Do you want children?
Where do you want to live?
What kind of lifestyle do you want?
What does a good life look like to each of you?
Compromise is inevitable in relationships. But when two people have fundamentally competing visions for their futures, it can create resentment — particularly if one person feels they’ve had to sacrifice something deeply important to them in order for the relationship to continue.
You also need to be able to talk about the future.
Trying to build a life with someone who refuses to discuss where the relationship is going can create enormous uncertainty and anxiety.
A healthy partnership allows you to plan, dream, make decisions and feel that you’re actively building something together.
5. Can You Live With Their Difficult Qualities?
Everyone comes with baggage.
We all have flaws, imperfections, struggles, emotional blocks and histories that affect how we show up in relationships.
So choosing a life partner isn’t about finding someone who has none of those things.
A more useful question is:
Are this person’s difficult qualities things I can realistically live with?
Some partners will simply be a better fit for us than others.
Sometimes the combination of one person’s wounds, patterns and triggers with another person’s can create a perfect storm — one where both people continually exacerbate each other’s pain.
It’s worth asking whether the challenges in your relationship are inviting you both into growth, or whether they’re keeping you locked in a painful pattern that never really changes.
Knowing yourself matters here.
What can you live with? What can you tolerate? What genuinely isn't good for you?
Someone can be a good person and still have challenges that are too challenging for you. Being able to recognise that is an important part of discernment.
6. Can You Be a Team When Life Gets Hard?
Life will throw curveballs.
There will be job losses, family problems, illness, grief, financial stress, exhaustion, uncertainty and seasons where one or both of you simply aren’t at your best.
So one of the most important questions you can ask is:
When things get hard, do we come together or turn against each other?
This doesn’t mean you’ll never argue under stress. No couple navigates every difficult moment perfectly.
But underneath the frustration and fear, is there still a sense that you’re on the same team?
Can you recognise when things are hard and ask, How can we be kind to each other through this? What do you need? What do I need? How can we support each other?
Or does stress consistently make the relationship oppositional — me versus you, my needs versus yours?
These patterns can absolutely change. Teamwork is something couples can consciously develop.
But if every difficult season seems to divide you, it’s worth paying attention to that before committing to building a life together.
One of the great gifts of a long-term partnership is knowing that someone is in your corner when life gets hard. And there can be immense grief in being in a relationship where the person who is supposed to be in your corner feels absent when you need them most.
Choosing a Partner — And Being One
Ultimately, choosing a life partner isn’t about finding a miraculous person who ticks every box and never challenges you.
It’s about finding someone with whom you can build trust, respect, friendship and a shared life — someone whose imperfections you can navigate and who can navigate yours.
And importantly, these questions aren't only about assessing another person.
They’re also an invitation to ask:
Am I embodying these qualities too?
Am I trustworthy? Am I respectful? Can I be playful and warm? Can I talk openly about the future? Can I support my partner when things are hard? Am I willing to take responsibility for my own patterns and grow?
The goal isn’t perfection.
It’s two people who share enough of the same values and principles — and who are willing to keep showing up for themselves, each other, and the life they’re choosing to build together.
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[00:01:40]:
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking about how to choose a life partner, which feels like a massive topic. And in almost 300 episodes, I don't think I've addressed it in such plain terms. And in truth, today's episode is going to be less about how to choose that person or how to find that person and more me giving you some guiding questions to assess if you're in a relationship, whether that is someone that you maybe want to commit to and build a life with. And I know so many people, particularly who experience various flavours of relationship anxiety, anxious attachment, maybe fearful avoidant attachment, can experience a lot of doubt and reservations even at the same time as you feel very attached to someone. Sometimes our fear and worry about the future can make us it all seem very high stakes. And of course it is high stakes.
[00:02:37]:
Choosing who you're gonna build a life with is one of the biggest decisions you'll ever make, and it's not one that you should make lightly or without intention. And I'm hoping that the guiding principles that I give you in today's episode might provide a bit of a scaffold or a framework to reflect on your own relationship. Or if you're not in a relationship at the moment, that you can start to build out your own list or the things that feel really important to you around the kind of relationship you wanna be in, how you wanna feel in your relationship and what really are your non-negotiables for committing to someone and building a life together. Okay, so the first one is choose someone who you respect and admire and who you know respects and admires you. This we would hope would be obvious, but I think there are lots and lots of people, I know there are lots of people in relationships where these things are lacking, where there is a basic lack of respect, admiration, where you don't see your partner as being a person of character and integrity, and maybe you look down upon them or you disapprove of them, and yet you're still in the relationship and channelling all your energy into criticising them into changing. And of course, that's not a very positive or healthy or conducive relational environment. And I think sometimes, and I say this absolutely from experience in a previous relationship, that I was very much guilty of not really feeling respect or admiration for my partner and yet persisting in the relationship. I think sometimes we do just have to zoom out and realise that these things should be an absolute bare minimum, that we really see our partner as being a person of integrity, as being a person of high character, of being a person that we really admire and look up to and feel proud to be with.
[00:04:22]:
And if those things are missing, if we don't see them in that light, then of course that's going to trickle into every aspect of our relationship. They're gonna feel it. We're gonna feel it. It's really hard to build a life with someone who you don't have that respect and admiration for and who you fundamentally disapprove of, the person that they are and the way that they live their life. So I think that respect and admiration should be really foundational to anyone that you're thinking about committing to and building a life with. Okay. The second piece is around trust. And I think that trust is absolutely paramount.
[00:04:59]:
We can't have emotional safety without trust. So choose someone who you trust, who has demonstrated themselves to be worthy of your trust. I've spoken before about the fact that trust and trustworthiness go hand in hand. And it's sort of like, you know, laying bricks one at a time. We might open ourselves up and someone demonstrates themselves to be trustworthy, and so we extend that trust to them. And over time, we start to build this really strong sense of, this is a person who I can depend on. This is a person who keeps their word. This is a person who can apologise when they get something wrong or make a mistake.
[00:05:35]:
This is a person who I know I can call and they will be there. This is a person who I can share vulnerable Trust is a lot bigger than just telling the truth. It's actually about the overall emotional environment of the relationship. And when that's lacking on any of those counts, whether it's that you feel like this person's unreliable or flaky, or you feel like you can't bring vulnerable things to them because they shut down or they blow up or they get defensive, all of that can really erode the trust base of the relationship over time. And that's not It's not to say that if you're listening and you notice those factors being present in your relationship, that the relationship's too far gone or that it's irreparable. But it is really important that trust be prioritised in a relationship, and it needs to, of course, go in both directions. But having this really deep commitment to one another, to trust and trustworthiness, to embodying that, and part of that is absolutely repairing if there have been any breaches of trust, if there have been any betrayals, if there have been any ruptures that you feel have damaged that trust base. So you definitely don't want to be committing to building a life with someone who you fundamentally do not trust and do not feel emotionally safe with, because it's so hard to build anything healthy if that's not there.
[00:06:59]:
Okay, the next one is a little bit lighter, and it is simply, do we love being around each other? Do we have fun together? Do we laugh together? Do we have a strong friendship alongside being romantic partners? Now, again, of course we'd hope that this would be an obvious one, but I think it does bear mentioning that Friendship, warmth, fun, lightness, play— these things are so cup-filling for a relationship. And if it's only ever pragmatic or logistical or serious or intense, that's really hard to sustain over the long term. And I think that having that baseline of enjoying each other's company, of having a relational environment, a home life that feels warm and loving and playful, I think that That builds so much connection in little moments that really contributes to the goodwill in the relationship over time and really helps to balance out the hard stuff. Because there will, of course, be hard stuff. It's not all gonna be play and laughter every day for the rest of your life. But I think the more that you have that foundation of a really strong friendship and just loving each other's company, loving being around each other, loving sharing what happened in your day with each other, loving sharing the things that you're passionate about with each other, all of that contributes to a really solid base that supports the overall relational environment and certainly provides you with the strength to go through the hard stuff together. Okay, the next one is, do you have a vision for what you want for your lives? And is that vision that you each have compatible with the other's? So this is more of a compatibility point, but if you have fundamentally different ideas of what you want for your lives, and certainly things that are quite binary around marriage or kids or what kind of lifestyle you want to live, if one of you wants to be in Yeah. The city and the other wants to be on a homestead.
[00:08:51]:
Clearly something's got to give there. And of course there's always going to be compromise in relationships and you're not always going to see eye to eye. But I think having a broadly shared vision of what it means to live a good life, the things that you want for yourselves, I think that helps so much because I think it's just one less obstacle that you need to overcome if you do have different visions that feel like they're in competition with each other. And I think What can happen when you have competing visions and it feels like only one person can get their way, so to speak, that can be a really reliable way to build resentment. If one person feels like they're having to sacrifice what they want for their lives, and particularly if that's a big thing and it's a permanent thing, that can be really damaging to the relationship and can lead to a lot of regret and resentment. So having a shared vision, and it goes without saying, being able to talk about that vision, being able to talk about the future, committing to someone who refuses to talk about the future is not a a good idea because that is a recipe for anxiety. You can't really build a future with someone where there's this big cloud of uncertainty hanging over it. So being able to plan together, have those conversations, and feel like you are building together, I think that's really important as well.
[00:10:03]:
Okay, the next one is choose someone whose difficult qualities are things that you can live with. So the things about them that challenge you, their flaws, their imperfections, their struggles, their emotional blocks, whatever, their history. We've got things that can be challenging to live with and to deal with and that come up and we do have to confront and turn towards and all of that. So it's not about finding some person that is a clean slate and has no baggage, but we do wanna find someone whose baggage doesn't cause us immense pain and suffering. Because of course there will be certain partners who are a better fit for us and others who the unique combination of their stuff with our stuff might just be a perfect storm that makes it all too hard and painful. And where we're at, where they're at, our current capacity and skill level and all of those things, it might just be forcing something that is mainly causing pain and suffering. So I think there is a lot of discernment required in being able to look honestly at, are the ways in which we challenge each other an invitation into growth and an opportunity for growth? Or is it just locking me in a really painful pattern that exacerbates all of my stuff and my stuff then exacerbates their stuff and we just stay stuck? and maybe get worse. So I think being able to be honest with yourself about that and knowing yourself enough to know what's good for you, to know what you can live with, to know what you can handle, to know what you can tolerate, I think that's very wise to be able to make that call and to realise when someone else's challenges might just be too challenging for you, or whether it's actually something where you can go through it together.
[00:11:49]:
Okay, and the last one that I want to share is that You should choose someone who you're able to band together with even in the hard moments and on your worst days. Now, that's not to say that you won't have conflict or that you perfectly execute teamwork and there's never a terse moment or anything like that. Of course, that's not realistic at all. But fundamentally, when life throws curveballs, when things get hard, when you're feeling vulnerable, when something happens, you get fired from your job or you've got a sick parent or some other big thing happens that feels overwhelming and scary, are you Are you able to come together as a team and support each other and be stronger for it on those hard days and through those hard seasons? Or do challenging things tend to divide you and turn you against each other? Because for a lot of people, particularly when we've got a lot of insecurity and fear and protective patterns at play, when we're under stress, we can really turn on each other. And that can really be fuel on the fire of all of our underlying stuff. If we don't have the skills and the maturity and the capacity to actually see that happening and go, okay, this is hard. How can we be kind to each other through this? How can we support each other? How can we recognise that this is going to be a tough season and see what we each need and how we can come out of this stronger, or at least come out of this still standing? I think if under stress, you and/or they default straight to self-absorption and me and my needs and you're not supporting me and getting very oppositional, again, as is very common, it's not something that you need to ashamed of, but stress can make us very selfish, then that can be tricky. And again, it's not something that you either have or you don't.
[00:13:36]:
It's certainly something you can develop over time. But if you know that the track record in your relationship is that whenever hard things happen, you turn on each other, or it divides you, or it foretells a big storm for the relationship, that's certainly something that you want to work on and look at and really consciously try and shift away from if you want to commit to building a life with this person. Because life Yeah. Life can be hard, and there will be hard times. And really, the whole point of being in a long-term relationship is knowing that you have someone in your corner on those days. And I actually think there's immense grief in being in a relationship where you don't have someone in your corner who's meant to be in your corner. And that can be so heartbreaking to feel like something big happens and the person who you really want to be there and to make feel a little bit lighter on those really hard and heavy days is unable or unwilling to do that for you. So that's really something to look for, to cultivate, to strive for in your relationships as well.
[00:14:39]:
Okay, so I hope that was helpful. I hope it's given you something to reflect on if you're in a relationship at the moment, or if you're just thinking about a future relationship and some of the things that you might really look for and seek in a partner and seek to embody in a partner. Because of course, it's not just about finding some miracle perfect person And it's also about striving to embody and be the best partner that you can be so that you attract someone who is like-minded and has similar values and principles that guide their own relationships. Okay. Thanks as always for joining me, guys. So grateful for those of you who leave reviews and feedback. If you're on Spotify, you can leave a comment under the episode. Follow the show, subscribe on YouTube.
[00:15:18]:
All of those little things that don't mean much to you actually are a huge help to me and help me to continue to grow the audience and for the show to find new people. So grateful as always.
[00:15:28]:
Thanks for your support, and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks, guys.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
choosing a life partner, relationship guidance, relationship anxiety, anxious attachment, fearful avoidant attachment, respect in relationships, admiration in relationships, trust in relationships, emotional safety, trustworthiness, relationship framework, building a life together, non-negotiables in relationships, relationship compatibility, shared vision, compromise in relationships, resentment in relationships, relational environment, friendship in relationships, fun in relationships, laughter in relationships, planning a future together, personal growth in relationships, managing conflict, relationship challenges, teamwork in relationships, supporting each other, stress in relationships, long-term relationships, relationship advice, building emotional connection