The Question You Should Be Asking Before You Commit
When life gets hard, and it will, who's standing next to you?
Dating is fun. That's actually the problem.
We fill early relationships with dinners, vacations, and easy Sunday mornings. We evaluate compatibility over cocktails and chemistry. And then we get married, and real life shows up: loss, illness, stress, uncertainty. Suddenly we're looking at the person across from us wondering, who are you, really?
On a recent episode of Ask a Matchmaker, I sat down with Elena Nicolaou, senior editor at Today.com, who shared a deeply personal experience that crystallized something I've always believed about partnership. Elena went through a significant health scare and an emotional loss, and in the middle of it, lying in a hospital room, she had a profound realization about her husband.
"I was so happy it was him who was next to me. Like, thank God it's Dave. We're in this together."
- Elena Nicolaou
That moment, that particular kind of gratitude, is what I want every person I work with to feel. Not just the butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling of new love, but the bone-deep relief of knowing your partner is exactly who you need them to be when everything is falling apart.
Dating Doesn't Stress-Test Relationships
Here's the uncomfortable truth: dating, as we do it, is largely consequence-free. You can disappear when things get awkward. You can avoid the hard conversations. You can perform your best self indefinitely, and so can the other person.
Elena put it brilliantly during our conversation. She said she'd been warned by many people that you shouldn't get engaged until you've navigated serious hardship together. She and her husband had gotten engaged after just one year, and she'd wondered: what happens when things get really bad? Will we handle it?
Then they did. And they found out.
The Team Mentality Test
In our house, my husband George and I call ourselves "Team Penguin." It sounds silly, but it's a daily reminder of something serious: we are only as healthy as whoever is having the worst moment right now. When I'm struggling, George carries more. When he's struggling, I do. The decisions we make aren't about what Maria wants or what George wants. They're about what the team needs.
This is why I consistently advise people not to move in with someone unless they're engaged. Not because of tradition, but because of psychology. When you're still evaluating a relationship, you're looking for exits. You're keeping score. Every frustrating quirk becomes evidence for or against the verdict you haven't yet reached.
Engagement is a psychological commitment. It says: I'm not auditing you anymore. I'm in this. Now let's learn to be a team.
As Elena put it, and she'd describe herself as someone who can default to "I" thinking over "we" thinking, moving in while engaged forced her to think differently. She couldn't write off a frustrating moment as a sign the relationship was doomed. She had to solve it. And that, it turns out, is what real partnership looks like.
What to Look For, and How to Look
I asked Elena what advice she'd give someone who's dating and wants to find a true teammate. Her answer was simple and honest: I just trust Dave completely. But she also said something more concrete. During my Forever Blueprint Intensive, one of the things she'd written on her list was "good in a crisis."
You can see this before the real crises come, if you know what to watch for.
How do they handle inconvenience? The lost wallet, the delayed flight, the ruined plan. Do they make the bad moment bigger, or do they help contain it?
How do they take care of others, whether pets, friends, or family? Elena saw how her husband cared for his dog and thought: this is a person who knows how to take care of someone.
How do they respond when you need something they weren't expecting to give? Not in a grand gesture, but in an ordinary, unglamorous Tuesday-night kind of way.
It's not a hypothetical. It's a question worth sitting with while you're still in the early days, while you still have the choice.
On Grieving Differently
Elena also shared something that every couple navigating hardship needs to hear: partners don't always process on the same timeline. Elena's husband was as devastated as she was in the immediate aftermath of their loss, but he moved toward okay faster than she did. And for a while, that gap was its own kind of hurt.
But here's what she came to understand: different timelines aren't a sign that one person cared more. They're just a sign that two people are human in slightly different ways. What matters is whether each person respects the other's pace, and whether the one who's doing better still shows up for the one who isn't yet.
If you're in a relationship where you're experiencing loss differently than your partner, one thing that can help: don't have the conversation in your living room. Go for a walk. Moving together, side by side, changes the dynamic. You're less likely to retreat into separate corners. You keep going. And you'd be surprised what a 3-hour walk and some ice cream can work through.
Dating is a privilege. Finding your person can be extraordinary. But the person worth finding isn't just the one who's fun to be with on a Saturday. It's the one who shows up, steady and present, when Saturday turns into something harder than you planned for.
That's the teammate you're looking for. Don't settle for anything less.
If you're looking for a partner who'll be next to you in the hard moments and every ordinary Tuesday in between, that's exactly what we look for too. You can join the database for free and be considered as a potential match, or become a client and let us get to work. Visit Agape Match to learn more.
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