What’s the best predictor of success in a relationship? 

Today there are dozens of companies and websites that offer complex instruments to assess your compatibility across a range of values. Are you indoor types or outdoor types? Introverts or extraverts? Optimists or Pessimists? Morning people or night people?

I say, “Forget about the larks and nightingales. Forget horoscopes or computer dating.”  I suggest that the best way to predict domestic bliss is to assess how early your prospective mate thinks you should leave for a scheduled event.

Paul is brilliant man. He earned a Phi Beta Kappa key from UCLA. But he seems to have a blind spot when it comes to timing. We live in Los Angeles, one of the worst traffic quagmires in the world. Yet every time we go anywhere, especially to the Hollywood Bowl on a Friday night, he is surprised that we hit traffic. “I didn’t figure on this,” he says. 

There must be something like traffic amnesia. Or maybe Tommy Lee Jones dropped in with that little blinky thing from “Men in Black”—the thing that erases only certain memories.

I’m a planner and on the emotional continuum, I’m prone to anxiety. I always plan for the worst- case scenario. When deciding what time to leave for an event, I count backwards from curtain time. I always expect the curtain to go up exactly when the ticket says it will, except of course at the Hollywood Bowl, where an 8:30 concert begins promptly at 8:40. After traffic and parking, I factor in the wait in line for the restroom. God bless those establishments with the foresight to hire those walkie-talkie-wearing women who expedite the worst traffic jam of the night.

When leaving for a concert or the theater, the routine in our house goes something like this. Fifteen minutes before the time we agreed to leave, I start packing up the house, turning on lights, closing doors. Paul decides it’s time to set the VCR to record some obscure show he’s found in the television guide. I start pacing. He gets annoyed. I sit by the door with my purse on my arm. He gets really annoyed.

We eventually get stuck in traffic, and I feel self-righteous and vindicated, if only for the moment. We always make it to the event on time, but just once, I wish the angst were confined to the characters on stage.