George Blair-West

Around 500 years ago, Erasmus told us that prevention was better than cure.

Now that might seem forward-thinking, but when blood-sucking leeches are the best cure you've got at your disposal, while you're hanging around waiting for them to work, you've got to start to wonder why this clearly bizarre treatment was needed in the first place.

And I'm going to propose

that preventing long-term relationship breakdown is as important as preventing serious illness.

I'm going to suggest that the way we see romantic love, and in particular finding the one,

is a big part of that problem.

So, in my 20 years of working with couples, I've come to see a relationship breakdown as being the result of an inability to overcome an emerging mismatch in the relationship.

Now, why do I use that word mismatch?

Well, it steps around an issue that can otherwise hijack therapy, the question of who is to blame.

which of course is the other person.

And this approach allows me to then focus on making or remaking the match.

But that got me wondering, so when does the mismatch begin?

If prevention is the goal, when does the problem take hold?

And I found that if I looked back, the majority of the time, I could trace it to before that couple actually even committed.

before they married, before they had children.

For example, one of the more significant predictors of divorce is how long a couple date before the marriage proposal.

In a 2015 US study of 3,100 people, they found that if the couple waited one to two years, there was a 21% reduced likelihood of divorce compared to if they proposed in less than 12 months.

But if you waited three and a half years until the infatuation was well and truly over, then the likelihood of divorce was reduced by a massive 48%.

So...

My daughter, a dating coach, and I wrote a book about how to choose your partner.