Relationships

You Only Need To Have This One Thing In Common With Your Partner And Friends

But you do need a similar world view

I never in a million years would have picked my husband on a dating app.

He loves baseball. I despise all sports. He is a perfectionist. I am a half-asser. He doesn’t read novels at all. I write them. His favorite pastime is recording music. I have a tin ear. He is almost a teetotaler. I love a good dive bar. He is a vegetarian. I like meat.

Not only that, but he is Dutch. When we met, he had just poured everything he had into starting a high-end hifi business in Heerlen, the Netherlands.

Yet I knew within a few minutes of meeting him that I would marry him. I called my dad that night — April 1, 2004 — to tell him I had met my next husband.

That’s how sure I was.

I didn’t tell Harrie, my husband of not quite 16 years as I write this, that I’d decided to marry him. I still had a boyfriend I needed to sort things out with.

Harrie finished his visit to his U.S. relatives and returned to the Netherlands without us having so much as kissed, but we started emailing and then chatting online, and a few months later I scraped up plane fare and visited him in the Netherlands, and two years later he moved here and we married.

At the time I met Harrie, I’d been divorced for a couple of years and after that nightmare experience I had my priorities straight. The must-have qualities I wanted in a spouse were kindness, honesty and intelligence. Everything else was negotiable.

Even I thought it was a little funny that I ended up marrying someone completely different from what I would have thought was my dream man.

I used to fantasize about a possible future relationship with a some hypothetical fellow reader/writer. We’d sit in bed and read aloud interesting tidbits to each other while drinking wine. We’d swap books. I did some online dating before I met Harrie, and I’d check boxes for all the things I was looking for. I never felt a strong click with anybody I met that way.

And now I understand why.

I don’t really care what a man’s occupation or hobbies or interests are. I care about his personal qualities and world view.

Harrie and I do share a world view.

So while we don’t agree about what music to play or food to serve during dinner, we see the world with the same eyes. Maybe not 100 percent, but close.

The very same thing is true of friends. Our friends are all over the place in terms of what they do for a living and what kind of a lifestyle they have. On paper, we would seem to have very little in common with many of them. And yet, we have the same worldview, and apparently, at least in my world, that’s all that really matters.

Blue collar or white collar, young or old, American or not, college educated or not, wealthy or poor, every single friend we have has turned out to have the same worldview.

That cannot be by accident.

Many of these friends are people I knew for years before I married Harrie. Trump was just a dumbass who occasionally appeared in supermarket tabloids for crass behavior; there wasn’t a “Did you vote for Trump?” litmus test years ago.

Nor did I ever ask people, “Hey, if there’s a deadly pandemic ravaging the globe someday, do you think you’ll wear masks in public?” Or: “If there’s ever an attack on Congress, you’ll think that’s a bad thing, right?”

In no way was I sorting people out. I fell into friendship with people because they seemed like good and interesting people, and this is where we are now.

I hope dating apps have better algorithms now and can suss out deeper things than “I like hiking,” which is what my still-single grown son says every woman he sees on apps claims as her favorite pastime. But if not, my best advice is to stop worrying so much about having things in common.