Hi and welcome back to savvy psychologist I'm Dr. Ellen Hendrickson and I'll help you

meet life's challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.

Listener Anna from Toronto wrote in and asked how to determine whether the person

you're dating is the right match for you. And Anna speaks for an entire

generation with this question because for millennia we've partnered within our tribe,

our village, or our neighborhood. And if we were lucky the number of

eligible partners we had to choose from reached maybe a dozen.

Fast forward to today, however, and we can connect with untold numbers of people with the right swipe of a finger. But choice can be a double-edged

sword. It breeds the illusion that we can find our soulmate if we just sort

patiently and diligently enough.

And in turn, this leads to second guessing, high pressure first dates,

and rampant perfectionism in pursuit of the one.

So what does a diligent mate search look like in the 21st century and how do we know when we found the one?

Do birds suddenly appear every time they are near? Do stars fall from the sky every time they walk by? The bad news, there's no foolproof formula.

The good news, there are some rules of thumb to follow, though you can still find true love even if you break them all. So this week

here are six ways to dive into the search. So tip number one is you found a match

if you well match.

When looking for a mate, people are, shall we say,

optimists.

A study in the journal Science Advances

examined heterosexual online daters across four major US cities and they found

that people have a general idea of how attractive they are and from there they tend

...