Don't think about selecting a mate as simply finding somebody who checks the right boxes. That matters, of course. We are biological organisms, somewhat programmed, and we're going to have things we find attractive, things we like, and things we can tolerate without much resistance. The checklist is real. But it's the smallest part of the story.
Beyond the checklist, your nervous system has to have been in a relaxed state for a long enough stretch of time before you can attract the right person, and before you can make a clear decision about them. When you're regulated, you choose differently. When you're not, your decision-making gets hijacked by the wrong chemistry, adrenaline, cortisol, the hormones of fear and hunger and lack. People in a dysregulated state don't choose partners. They reach for relief. And relief and love are not the same thing.
Now, I don't think you can be in a completely relaxed state when you meet someone new, and you shouldn't be. There's always a little nervousness, a little adrenaline, and that's entirely natural. That kind of nervousness is healthy. It's the moment you want your guard up, not slammed shut, but up. You want to be paying attention to all the micro-behaviors a person is showing you. How they treat the waiter. What they do when they're slightly inconvenienced. Whether their words and their face agree with each other. You're not going to write someone off for one wrong move, nobody passes that test, but cumulatively, you should be watching. The pattern tells the truth long before the person does.
There are other factors in choosing a romance, and one of the most important is almost never discussed: how two nervous systems combine. Forget the two individuals for a second and look at the third thing they create when they're together. Is it calm, or is it volatile? Two good people can form a bad unit. You can have two kind, intelligent, well-meaning individuals who, the moment they're in a room together, produce nothing but static. That third thing, the combined field, matters more than either résumé.
I know this because I lived the wrong version of it for years. For a long stretch of my life I chose highly anxious people, and I was highly anxious myself. Neither of us had any awareness of the dynamic we were creating, so there was never any progress, just repetition. We triggered each other constantly. We lived hyper-emotional, reactive lives, and all of our character defects, the ones shaped by our childhoods, were right out in the open. Not labeled, not understood, nobody could have explained them cleanly in the moment, but obvious. Two unregulated systems feeding each other's fear and calling it passion.
That's the trap. When you're anxious, intensity feels like love. The racing heart, the obsession, the highs and lows, your body reads all of it as connection, when really it's just two alarm systems setting each other off. The calm, available, regulated person can feel boring to someone in that state, because there's no spike, no drama, no familiar chaos to match the chaos you grew up in. So you pass over the very thing that could heal you and chase the thing that will wound you again. We don't choose what's good for us. We choose what's familiar.
The work, then, comes before the choosing. You regulate your own nervous system first, over a long enough period that calm becomes your baseline instead of a foreign country. Only then can you even perceive the right person, because only then does steadiness start to feel like safety instead of boredom. You're not really selecting a mate. You're becoming the kind of regulated organism that's finally capable of recognizing one.