messy exchange stories. The experts could sift through the data, find the right matches for the right people, and boom, problem solved.”
Resignedly, she looked out the window of her Capitol Hill office and said, “Look at China and India. They've had arranged marriages for millennia. We're the last civilized country that lets people risk living without a partner. And the best we could come up with were the federal exchange and the mandate—half measures doomed to failure."
Adequate Partner Requirements
The signing ceremony for the Partnership Act took place on January 27, 2018. The President surrounded herself with supporters, each of whom lobbied furiously to be among those closest to the popular head of state. One person who did not need to lobby to be there was camera operator Jim Leonard.
"Just another day on the job, as far as I was concerned," Leonard told me in his living room in Silver Spring, Maryland. "I remember the President laughing, all smiles. I remember her looking right into the camera, right at me, and saying, 'This law is for the single people. If you're happy with your partner, you can keep your partner.'" Leonard gave a bitter laugh. "What a crock of shit."
The mandatory minimum requirements set by the Bureau of Partnership reflected the consensus opinion of an expert panel of psychologists. On the basis of decades of work and research into relationship counseling, they came up with a list of attributes they considered necessary for a successful relationship.
One psychologist on the panel was Clyde West, a distinguished professor from Princeton. I spoke with him by phone because he