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Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book Why You're Still Single
by Evan Marc Katz and Linda Holmes
Published by Plume; May 2006;$13.00US/$17.00CAN;
0-452-28738-3
Copyright © 2006 Evan Marc Katz and Linda Holmes

Hitting on 20

There's a reason you don't ask for another card when you have 20 in blackjack. It's because there's only a miniscule chance that you're going to beat the hand you already have. Recognize when your relationship is a 20 and when it's time to hold on to it instead of quitting for greener grass.

Evan

You've probably heard this story before:

Girl meets guy and knows, from their first kiss, that he's "the one." Meeting him, to her, is the equivalent of getting 20 in blackjack. He may not be perfect, but he's way closer than she's gotten before, and that's good enough. After a bit of soul-searching, she decides that this is going to be the man she marries. She's secure in her decision because she's gone out with so many men before and knows that catches like this are hard to find. Then, suddenly, he breaks up with her -- even though he admits they had something special, even though he said he'd never loved a woman in his entire life the way he loved her.

What lingers with me when I hear this story is not whether the guy was telling the truth about his feelings for her, but whether breaking up will ultimately be the right move for him. This tale -- experienced by most of us -- brings up a very common dilemma. I call it the "You Just Know" syndrome.

In my mind, it takes nothing away from a perfectly happy couple to acknowledge that however much you might want to say "you just know," when a relationship is right you never just know. You can't. Life is too unpredictable and has far too many variables. Infidelity, boredom, financial ruin, and physical decline have all been known to split up couples that have taken eternal vows. For many people, it's not which of these things might happen, it's which of these things might not happen. And still, for all the crap that life throws our way, somehow, 50 percent of marriages manage to survive. That's an amazing statistic right there.

My parents were married for thirty years before my dad passed away. When I was young, I asked each of them independently how they knew that they were meant to be together. Not surprisingly, neither of them knew for sure. Well, how could they? He was twenty-three and she was twenty-two when they got hitched. They didn't know much of anything. And had Mom determined at some point that she was better off alone, or Dad felt that they married too young and needed to experience other people, this would be just another story of another suburban divorce.

The point is that my parents made it, but they didn't have to. They had no idea what the next thirty years had in store for them when they said, "I do." All they did was believe in the sanctity of their commitment, and they found a way to make it work.

I believe in love and lifetime partnerships and all that. I just can't shake the idea that with any permanent contract into which you voluntarily enter, you're going to have second thoughts. It's smart to go in with a full awareness of what a fifty-year commitment entails. If you don't think you're cut out for it, better to delay or bail than to go through the motions until you get the divorce that in your heart you knew was inevitable.

Will you ever know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you're meant to spend the rest of your life with one man? Probably not. But the next time you get 20 in blackjack, consider how long it took to pull that card and whether it's worth it to keep fishing for that ace.

Linda

I made the same New Year's resolution for about ten years in a row. Literally, I made it every January 1, over and over again. And I failed at it every year, until I ultimately gave up. It went like this: I resolve to have at least 25 percent fewer feelings about everything.

It might sound stupid, and weird, and doomed, but I meant well. I'd been flattened by my own swoony, impassioned, powerful reactions to things to the point where I made a very conscious decision to get brutally rational about everything. And when I decided to get brutally rational about myself, I had no shortage of theories -- some goofy, some not. I had a handful of major revelations about some of my ill-advised choices, and, indeed, the frequency with which I made those stupid choices decreased. I made enormous improvements to my life on a bunch of different fronts, and it was absolutely the result of conscious effort, and good for me, right?

Right. Absolutely. But would you like to know how many feelings I have about things, compared to before? Yeah, it's about the same. Because no matter how smart you get, and no matter how carefully you think through exactly what you want, and no matter how hard you try to give your life rules, the way the Atkins diet or a solitaire game has rules, there are still going to be emotional, ethereal things going on that aren't going to entirely make sense. This, to me, is where the challenge lies in not letting a good relationship get away from you while, at the same time, not settling for less than you want.

Because, on the one hand, I agree with Evan. Of course, you never "just know." And people who think they're going to "just know" often wind up engaging in a lot of magical thinking and hunting for signs, like those people who think it means something that Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy and Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln. Hey, when I was young, I knew a guy with a heart-shaped birthmark. I know about this stuff. It's insane to expect that there's going to be some grand Presentation of the Romantic Fantasy -- one that will lead you to absolute certainty that this is the person who's meant for you, and you for him, and you will never again doubt it. And you will never wonder if there's someone else out there, and you will never be attracted to anyone else, and you will never go through periods where you don't want to talk to him, or don't want to sleep with him, or don't feel like he gets you.

But, on the other hand . . . man, there's still a certain amount of alchemy involved. It's more than just the sum of the parts, where physical attraction plus good conversation plus shared values plus shared interests plus geographical and circumstantial practicality equals Congratulations, You Have Met the Right Person. I remember the first time I was with a guy and realized that just talking to him was giving me JELL-O knees. And realizing that it wasn't either a metaphor or a euphemism -- that being "weak in the knees" was a real thing, and it's really your knees, and they're really weak. I'll be damned. You know what I did? I laughed. Out loud. Try explaining that one to somebody you don't know well yet. Total number of guys, out of all the ones I have ever met, who have had that effect on me: three. Three. Out of a whole damn lot. Are they the most physically attractive guys I've ever met? Nope. Are they the ones I've liked the most or connected with the best? Nope. Would it ever occur to me that that meant I should marry them? Nope. My point is only that there's an element of just . . . well, honestly, who in the hell knows?

You do have to be rational, and you have to think logically about what you want. I've already said a bunch of times in this book that you have to play the odds, and, believe me, I'm not just saying it. And more and more, in my own life, I actually do it. Do the math, choose to exit situations that are no-win, choose to pursue the ones with the best apparent prospects or the most upsides or the most happiness along the way, and eat the fact that some part of me is never sure I did the right thing. There's no certainty with other people, ever. Everybody is a calculated risk. You're always guessing, and you're always gambling. And you're still going to have to hit a little good luck and good timing, because that's how it goes.

Ultimately, you'll never reduce a relationship to a science or a statistics problem. The mistake is in believing you're waiting to stumble over some vaguely defined notion of romantic destiny when, in fact, you're hunting for mathematical certainty. You can have the weak knees, you can have the finishing each other's sentences, you can have that mystical and elusive whatever, and you still won't "know," if you expect to "know" the way you know your own name. Because being smart doesn't really mean having fewer feelings about everything; it means tempering them with a little perspective.

Copyright © 2006 Evan Marc Katz and Linda Holmes