The first six weeks: what to actually pay attention to

The early weeks are when people gather the least useful information with the most enthusiasm. Everyone is on their best behaviour, chemistry is loud, and the brain is busily arguing for whatever it already wants.

Here is what is actually worth watching.

Watch the boring things

How they treat people who can do nothing for them. Waiters, drivers, the person on the phone. This is the single most reliable predictor available, and it is on display constantly and free.

Whether they are curious about you. Not complimentary — curious. Do they ask a follow-up question? Most people do not, and the ones who do are rare and worth noticing.

What happens when something small goes wrong. A late train, a wrong order. You are not looking for someone who never gets annoyed. You are looking for how quickly they recover and whether the annoyance lands on somebody.

How they talk about their exes. Everyone is entitled to one difficult story. If every previous partner was crazy, you are receiving a preview of how you will eventually be described.

Whether their words and their calendar agree. Enthusiasm is easy. Turning up on a Tuesday when it is inconvenient is data.

What tells you very little

Chemistry. It feels like information and it is not. See why chemistry is a terrible predictor.

Shared taste. Both liking the same music is pleasant and predicts nothing about whether you can survive a bad year.

How well they text. A different skill entirely, held by people who are not necessarily good at anything else.

Intensity. Fast, overwhelming certainty in week two is not a sign of depth. Sometimes it is enthusiasm. Sometimes it is a pattern that will look different in month six.

The six-week test

Around week six, the performance starts to slip — for both of you. That is not a decline, it is the beginning of the real thing.

Two questions are worth asking honestly at that point:

Do I like who I am when I am with this person?

Have we disagreed about anything yet, and how did it go?

The second matters enormously. A couple who have never disagreed by week six have either been very lucky or someone is swallowing things — and swallowing things has a shelf life, after which it comes out sideways.

Pace it deliberately

There is no prize for certainty at speed. Meet their friends. See them tired. Have one dull evening on purpose. Notice whether you can be quiet together, because comfortable silence early is one of the better signs there is.

If it is a virtual relationship, all of this applies with an extra step: you also need to meet the ordinary, offline version of their life. Meeting in Meta Horizon covers how that works in practice.

The one thing to refuse to ignore

If something makes you uneasy and you find yourself constructing an explanation for it, write it down. Early unease is very often accurate and almost always talked out of. You are allowed to leave at week six for a reason you cannot fully justify.