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The length of my reply may not communicate it, but I've been thinking about this question pretty much daily since 2017.
The answer is that if either a Man or Woman is looking at what the other can "bring to the table," the relationship is going to fail at some point. First, remember the passion-to-companionship cycle. At the outset, both parties generally want (and receive) fireworks. Somewhere pretty early on this gives way to a more "fun friends who have sex" situation. If it makes it two years (look around at your social circle and mark this as a milepost for breakups) then a lot of couples will get married if both parties are 28+. 7 Year itch within a marriage, 50/50 in America make it. Kids show up a lot of marriages are effectively dead but keep on going for the kids. Divorce late in high school or early college is most common for upper-middle class suburbanites.
The point of the above paragraph is that a romantic relationship and marriage that last 10,20,30 years changes so much that it is not possible for either party to meaningfully say "Yes, I'm in this for life" at the outset if the rubric is simply the "match score" for the other partner.
What's required is a personal commitment to the idea of a long-term relationship before you even meet the other person. And a recognition that the relationship will drastically change multiple times and require constant work. If that is the starting point, you've got a shot and then you can sort of grocery list for all of the matching attributes. If that is not your starting point, I think you can still have a decent enough romantic life, but you shouldn't think you're going to make it long term.
I don't blame this totally on the failing character of contemporary western folks. Most of marriage in human history (and, I would submit, the majority of it today worldwide) is basic economic survival and co-dependence. The idea of learning to love whichever person you ended up shaking up with to not starve to death is far more common the world over than "omg, this is how I met your mother" fairly tale stories. For a trip, read up on the emotional development of the arranged marriages of first generation Indian Couples in the U.S. from maybe the 1970s or so.
The idea of deep emotion, long-term pair bonding as the everything of marriage is a product of the massive growth in personal wealth the western world experienced after World War 2 and is also a good outcome of the mid-century feminist movement. It's just super, super rare. The bad outcome of this has been the destruction of the nuclear family since the 1960s. When the primary motivator is personal emotional satisfaction in a highly individualist society, the family is going to have a bad time absent some very strong microsocial pressures (i.e. high religiosity communities, or hyper invested "helicopter" parents who see the performance of their children as reflective of personal worth).
To conclude, however, I wouldn't call myself a marriage / long-term relationship cynic. In fact, I still think I want to get married (I just think the odds are low). I'm slightly optimistic that there's going to be some level of Gen-Z backlash to the crazy 4th wave feminism we see now and that may prompt new personal commitment to having a nuclear family and shedding some of the "but how do I maximize my own personal emotional state?" thinking. I am not Gen-Z, however, and their customs and ways are strange to me.
TLDR; It isn't about your partner, it's all about you.
I strongly agree with this.
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As someone that's been in the same relationship for over a decade, I agree with a lot of this. But one slight disagreement is that I wouldn't say I've ever made an explicit personal commitment to the idea of a long-term relationship. The way I would describe it is that I feel that I get a lot out of the relationship itself, which is different from getting something from the person I'm in the relationship with. In that way I think it's similar to having children. You don't really ask "what do kids bring to the table" and if you do then you're probably going to convince yourself it's not worth it. You have kids because you want to be a mother or a father, the value is in taking on that role and in forming and building that relationship. Sharing your life with someone that has their own agency (even if they use that agency in frustrating ways), the game of trying to make things work together, experiencing the emotional highs and lows.
So I would say that one of the important things for a long-term relationship is that both people really want to be in a relationship and they value being in a relationship.
In my opinion, this reveals a lot of very good and positive perspective on things. So, go MWei.
I would wager, however, that the overwhelming majority of currently married / long-term relationship'd people are miles away from sentiments like that.
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