I recently started a document called "what I like". It's mostly things from observations, imagination, and values.
Each section, and a small sample of the items for each one:
- Mandatory: wants to have children and raise them Catholic
- Likely necessary: can comfort our children, doesn't complain about people in a way that needs to not happen in my relationship
- Love languages: she doesn't rely too much on giving me gifts
- Traits or actions that have made me feel something or have interested me after I noticed them: confident passionate speaking in presentations and debates, shows laughter or excitement in response to something I do or make, often has big smile, silently waving to me, welcoming towards me, staying in pew to pray when others aren't, being curious about me
- Other signs of good match for me in particular (mostly imagination of what complementarity would look like): seeks my thoughts, explains things in my mind that I can't explain, inspires me to pursue something, our humor fits together and we enjoy each other's humor
- Things that should be acted on in a big and complementary way: imagination, curiosity, excellencism
- Things we should be able to enjoy together: creativity
- Misc.
Now I separately write about some people with a few other specific observations. For example, in the document about the girl I've likely been most obsessed with in terms of personality (I was prematurely committed to someone else and/or in denial until it was too late), I included how she laughed when I said this joke about her project "Pretty Places by _, more like Porta Potties by _" (honestly I included this one so she knows this is about her if she sees this post) and memories of her speaking with perfect confidence (that time in religion class when she said something about keeping legs closed might be my favorite). I could have avoided regret by quickly paying more attention to my vague feeling about her (partly with what this post is about) and trying more to have fun.
Thinking and writing about this stuff will probably help with having a more certain and accurately scaled perception, resisting the confirmation bias caused by the appeal of the idea that my search for someone good enough for me is easy or already finished.
To be clear, this is not the entire process of figuring out what to look for. These lists are mostly unfiltered, except I don't feel like writing about most of my physical attraction mostly because that would be boring. The whole thing should not be used as a checklist, and it should keep on evolving. It is an additional input to intuition.
My search for my future wife might benefit from also writing about platonic friends.
This kind of activity will likely be part of the Pansystellar Architecture.