Marry Your Idiot Friend
I’m going to tell you what I think you should look for in a partner, and I suspect you’re not going to hear it anywhere else: find a supportive idiot friend you want to sleep with.
That’s it. That’s the whole theory. Before you roll your eyes and dismiss this as some older guy embarrassing himself with a hot take, let me walk you through why, because I’ve thought about this more carefully than the sentence makes it sound.
Let’s start with the word “idiot.” I don’t mean stupid, I mean the kind of person you can be ridiculous with. The person who will watch a terrible movie with you and make it the best night. Someone who thinks your dumb joke is funny. Someone who isn’t being performative 24 hours a day. There’s an ease to this, and it’s rarer than you think. And it’s worth more than almost anything else you’ll find in another person.
“Friend” is the most important word in the phrase, and the most underrated one in how people choose partners. You need to actually like this person. As in, are you glad when their name lights up your phone? Do you want to tell them something funny that happened? Attraction fluctuates, life gets hard, our bodies change, and stress from living our lives is real. What you’re left with is whether you enjoy the company of the person you’re with. If the answer is no, you’re in trouble.
“Supportive” doesn’t mean a cheerleader who tells you you’re great no matter what. It means someone who is pointed in the same direction as you. Someone with similar values, and a compatible idea of what a good life looks like. They are mature enough to handle their own emotions without making them your problem every day. When things go sideways, because they will, this person will make it easier to get through and not harder. I know that’s not a low bar, but it’s the right bar.
“Want to sleep with” — I’ll leave that one to you. lol
Now, here’s the part where I get preachy, so bear with me. I’m writing this because I see smart young people making themselves miserable trying to find this. It shouldn’t be this hard, but the ubiquitous tools that people have been given aren’t helping.
Let’s start with the apps. You swipe on photos and bios. Looks. Career title. Height. A witty line. None of those things tell you whether someone is easy to be around. You can’t tell whether they’re kind when they’re tired or whether they’ll make you laugh on a bad day. The apps are optimized for the first 30 seconds of a first date, and everyone is using them to make one of the longest-lasting decisions of their lives. And then, once you’re in, the same device that got you there keeps whispering that there are always more options one swipe away. This is insanely stupid!
Social media has definitely made it worse. People are watching curated highlight reels of other people’s relationships, then measuring their own messy, unglamorous reality against that. That makes everyone feel like they’re settling even when they’re not.
Then there’s the myth of “The One.” The idea that somewhere out there is your perfect match, and when you meet them, you’ll know. This is hogwash and a very expensive fairy tale. There are probably dozens of people you could build a good life with. Finding one of them has far more to do with timing, proximity, and the choices you make together than with some cosmic inevitability. The One is a story that makes people blow up good relationships because they’re not perfect, or stay paralyzed because they haven’t felt thunderstruck yet.
The fear of settling is the flip side of this, and it’s super corrosive. Don’t get me wrong, don’t settle — ever. But people have lost the ability to distinguish between settling and choosing. Choosing someone who is real and good and here, even though they’re not perfect, is not settling.
The real question is not “could I do better?” but “is this person good, and am I legitimately happy with them?” If the answer is yes — you like them, you’re attracted to them, you share enough values to build something together, and the baggage they’re carrying isn’t the kind that’s going to break you — then you might be holding something worth keeping. Don’t throw it away because you talked yourself into thinking you deserve something without friction or imperfection. That doesn’t exist.
Which brings me to baggage, because I just used the word and I owe you a real answer on it. Everyone has some. You have some. I have some. It doesn’t disqualify anyone on its own. The question is whether the baggage is manageable. Whether it’s stuff a person is working on, or at least aware of, and whether you can live with it in the meantime.
That said, some baggage is absolutely dealbreaking, and you need to learn to recognize it early. The big ones:
Patterns of behaviour that don’t change regardless of effort or circumstance.
Never taking responsibility for their part in problems.
Contempt. This one is bad. Researchers who study marriages call it the single strongest predictor of divorce, and once you’ve seen it in someone, you can’t unsee it.
Addiction that isn’t being addressed.
Unresolved trauma the person has no interest in working through, that bleeds into everything.
You are not a therapist, and you cannot fix someone who doesn’t want to be fixed. I’ve watched people spend years finding this out the hard way.
You need to know the difference between “this is hard sometimes,” and “this is broken.” The first is an actual relationship. The second is a project that will exhaust you, and you will end up breaking up anyways.
So here’s the prescription, and it’s going to sound backwards.
Stop looking for a partner. Start making real friends.
The reason nobody can find a supportive idiot friend they want to sleep with is that we’ve collectively forgotten how to make friends in the first place. You can’t meet them on an app. You meet them doing something you actually like, in a room where nobody is trying to impress anyone. You realize, sometime later than you’d expect, that you like being around them. If your generation has a skills gap, it’s friendship, not dating.
I’ll say it again: I’m not telling you to settle. I’m telling you that a supportive idiot friend you want to sleep with — a person who is genuinely on your side, who you can be yourself around, who you find attractive, and who wants more or less what you want out of life — is a friendship that catches fire, not a consolation prize. And it’s probably the real definition of “The One.”
That’s my whole theory. You can do with it what you want.
This essay first appeared on Daniel’s Substack.