The Ultimate Wish List = Facts + Emotions!?
Dear Diary,
I was single for 36 years before I met Sam.
Okay, pipe down team: I'm not about to channel my inner Carrie Bradshaw and turn this into some Sex and the City confession session.
But here's the thing—we learn lessons in the weirdest places. And let me tell you, I spent A LOT of time in the weirdest dating trenches. Some would even say I have my PhD in first dates and second chances.
So buckle up, because I'm about to share the most unexpected tool I pulled from my decades of experience and disasters... one that I now use for everything from job hunting to apartment shopping.
The TLDR? Most people who come to me saying they are bad at making decisions are actually just unaware of the science behind their emotions. Stay with me!!
The Great Dating Experiment (A.K.A. My Personal Groundhog Day)
After 23 years of dating—yes, you read that right—I thought I had cracked the code. Spoiler alert: I absolutely had not.
Following yet another breakup with yet another "perfect on paper" guy, I decided to treat this mess like I would any work project. Time for lists! Spreadsheets! Data-driven romance (HT: Narie Foster)! Okay, actually, my therapist gave me homework (because apparently even my love life needed assignments): make the ultimate list of what I wanted in a partner. Easy peasy, right?
Wrong.
I wrote down everything I was looking for in my future husband: tall, hardworking, funny, optimistic, kind. You know, the usual suspects. I'm rushing down the hallway an hour before my session, list in hand, when I crash into my dad. Time's ticking, so when he asks what I'm up to, I figure—why not? Let's give Dad a crack at solving the mystery of my perpetual singleness. (Lord knows he'd met enough of my "almost-but-not-quite" boyfriends to have opinions…)
He glances at my carefully crafted list and says, "Lissy, this is a list of ingredients... but what kind of meal are you trying to cook?"
Record scratch.
Instead of just listing qualities like I'm ordering from a romantic catalog, he wanted me to understand how each quality would make me feel.
"Tall" wasn't just about attraction—it meant I could be my full, ridiculous self without shrinking to make someone else comfortable. "Hardworking" meant never having to apologize for my own ambition and getting to have those over-dinner conversations about work wins and failures.
This shift from checking boxes to checking feelings? Game. Changer.
When I met Sam, the feelings were instantly different (and hit all the priorities on my new list). We said "I love you" on our third date (I know, I KNOW) and we're getting married next month. Sometimes the heart knows what the list can't.
The Science Behind Your Feelings (They’re Smarter Than You Think)
Now, before you roll your eyes and think I've gone full “woo” on you, let's talk science.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett—who's basically the rockstar of emotion research—reveals emotions aren't automatic reactions that happen to you, but rather predictions your brain actively constructs based on past experience, current context, and bodily sensations.
Your brain is constantly trying to predict what's going to happen next to keep you alive and well. It uses past experiences to make these predictions, and emotions are part of this predictive process. When you feel anxious before a presentation, your brain isn't just "detecting" anxiety - it's constructing that emotional experience based on similar past situations, your current physical state, and contextual cues.
This means when you pay attention to feelings, you're essentially accessing your brain's assessment of the situation. An emotion might signal that your brain predicts a threat, an opportunity, or a need for rest. Ignoring these signals means missing important data about how your predictive system is interpreting your environment.
This is why my ingredient-list approach to dating was doomed from the start. Our emotional response is picking up on subtle cues about communication style, shared values, and cultural fit that your conscious mind might totally miss. I was ignoring millions of data points, or basically using a calculator when I needed a supercomputer.
We do this ingredient-list thing constantly: dream job requirements, perfect house features, ideal hire qualifications. But we're missing the emotional processing, and a key data point, that actually drives some of our best decisions.
A Hard Framework for the Soft Stuff
Here's how to harness your emotions for the good stuff:
Step 1: Next time you have to make a decision about something (like looking for a new job), make your logical list of qualities that you desire (yeah, we still need this part).
Step 2: Translate each of the items on the list to emotional outcomes—For each, ask: "How would this make me FEEL?" Be crazy specific. Does "good benefits" mean “feeling secure”? Valued? Free to take risks without going broke?
Step 3: Test your emotional hypotheses by practicing emotional granularity—When you're evaluating options, pay attention to what emotions exist and what they might be telling you. What story is your brain constructing from those sensations (or subtle, but powerful data points)?
The Bottom Line
Whether you're job hunting, house shopping, or making any major choice that'll impact your actual life, remember this: your emotions aren't just touchy-feely reactions—they're sophisticated data processors incorporating vast amounts of information your conscious mind can't see.
So next time someone tells you to "just think logically" about a big decision, you can tell them (politely) that your feelings are doing PhD-level analysis while their logic is still working on basic addition.
Trust the process. Trust the feelings. And maybe, just maybe, ask your dad for advice once in a while.
