I would claim that people enter into relationships to meet their psychological needs, and that the degree to which a relationship is successful, especially in the longer term, is dependent on the degree to which these needs are mutually met. This isn’t a particularly profound viewpoint (and I suspect there may be other viewpoints that might be as useful to analysing relationships), but at this moment it seems the best I have available.

At the more generic level, these needs can be things like companionship, security, sexual gratification, procreation – needs shared by the vast majority of humanity. They are relatively costless to acknowledge in oneself and shared by the majority of potential partners (meaning that you can generally identify a partner possessing them merely by assumption). This would appear to also be the level that such books as ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ view relationships. I have seen numerous partnerings based on such needs and, not infrequently, they do not appear to be lasting.

At a deeper level, people’s needs are more complex, though often based around variants (or even inversions of) the more generic needs. Relationships become a more complex task of identifying (and admitting to) your own needs while trying to ascertain the needs of potential partners and your ability to meet those needs, so as to find a partnering that mutually satisfies the participants’ needs. A good example of this process would be the movie Secretary (if you’re willing to look beyond the kinky sexual aspects to look more closely at the protagonists’ psyches and underlying needs).

So what are my own needs?

1) My own lack of any desire to procreate or raise children (thus necessitating a partner whose views aren’t too far different). The former is due to a couple of rather inconvenient traits closely attached to my family’s Y-chromosome plus a tendency to value the intellectual over the biological. The latter is due to extreme introversion (i.e. I value my peace and quiet too much).

2) A highly intelligent partner. Unlike many males, who feel a need to believe they're smarter than their partner, I’m seeking a partner at least (and preferably more) intelligent than myself. Certain differences of opinion with my peer group in my early teens turned me into a somewhat extreme intellectual chauvinist -- a mentality that has softened with time, but I suspect will never entirely leave me.

3) A high degree of psychological complexity in my partner. I tend to be enthralled by complex systems, so a woman would need to be complex in order to capture and hold my attention.

4) A high degree of psychological and emotional intimacy. The former because I see a relationship as at least as much a meeting of minds as a meeting of bodies, the latter because I tend to view myself as socially and emotionally isolated.

5) A partner who is able to tolerate, and hold her own with, my reflexive argumentativeness. For this reason I know with a fairly high degree of certainty that I would not be compatible with a true dominant or true submissive.

6) A partner who can tolerate my need for solitude, but also encourage me to socialise.

(This list may well be incomplete, so if I discover any further I'll add them.)

So what does all this mean?

Probably not a lot. Just because I have some impression of who I'm after in a mate, doesn't mean that she'll automatically fall into my lap. It does however hopefully mean that I'm less likely to waste some poor female's time whilst working out incompatibilities that should've been screamingly obvious to me in the first place.

Is that all?

Not quite. From the above, two things should be obvious. Firstly, that I tend to over-intellectualise affairs of the heart. Secondly, that I'm better at observing things & thinking about them than doing them.