What It Will Feel Like

You’re looking at this book because, at some point, you wondered not just who you should marry, but what it will feel like to be with them.

Not just on the first date, or under the chuppah, or when the compliments are flowing and the laughter is easy—but on a Tuesday night fifteen years from now when one of you is worn out and the other is distant and you’re both unsure how it got that way. You wondered: how can I know? How do I choose someone who will make me feel safe, alive, seen—not just once, but over time?

And the uncomfortable truth is: you can’t.

You can never predict it with certainty. Not because you’re naive or because the other person hid something. But because we’re all built with a strange blindness when it comes to emotional futures. Psychologists call this affective forecasting—our ability to predict our future emotional states—and the research is sobering. We’re wrong. Often. Systematically. And sometimes heartbreakingly.

Yet life demands that we choose anyway.

This book was born from the space between those two realities: our need to decide, and our inability to know. It’s about the art and science of choosing who to build a life with when the emotional terrain ahead is largely hidden. It’s about how to listen better—not just to someone else’s resume or references, but to the subtle patterns that hint at who they are in quiet moments. It’s about the tools that can help, the illusions that mislead, and the Torah wisdom that reaches across generations to whisper: this is how a heart learns to see.

What follows isn’t a list of red flags or a guide to compatibility. It’s an invitation to sharpen your emotional intuition, deepen your self-awareness, and learn to recognize the emotional music that plays between two souls.

You won’t finish this book knowing everything.

But you may come away knowing what kind of questions are worth asking.

And what kind of feeling is worth waiting for.

You’re not just asking who to marry—you’re asking what it will feel like to love them. Not on a first date. Not under the chuppah. But ten years later on a Tuesday night when life is ordinary and you both feel alone.

What It Will Feel Like is a groundbreaking book on emotional forecasting: the science, psychology, and Torah of how we try—and fail—to predict the emotional future of our relationships. Prof. Shmuel Neumann explains why attraction fades, why emotional blindness is hardwired into us, and why even the best intentions don’t always protect us from misjudgment.

This is not a guide to dating. It is a roadmap for those who want to choose with clarity, live with emotional truth, and build love not on fantasies—but on wisdom. From neuroscience to the Rambam, attachment theory to Rav Dessler, this book teaches us how to ask better questions, notice deeper signals, and choose someone not just for today—but for the quiet decades ahead.

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