I tagged along with a friend recently to help her find a new apartment in the Bay Area. While different landlords had different requirements, all of them asked for a reference list. A reference list is a list of people who can verify the tenant’s information for the landlord. After seeing a few places, I thought of the possibilities of someone checking previous relationship references when starting a new relationship. A person could provide references so that their previous dating partners could be consulted for feedback.

Think about relationships as very important agreements that put you next to someone physically and mentally. The key to success for such agreements is the co-existence of different people without the presence any critical conflicts that can’t be solved or avoided. How confident would you feel about relationships if you knew how the other person treated their previous ex’s? Unless your date brings his or her ex with them, accessing such information can be very tricky.

Of course, since the power of a broken heart sometimes exceeds that of a heart that wants to be broken, the previous ex might give out false information like “She was only after my money!” or “He was only interested in sex!“, the two usual dilemmas that many stereotypically foresee and few rarely address. In such cases, you will have to take the ex’s word for it, the same way one usually takes a blind dates’ word for the things they reveal.

We already have prenuptial agreements that cast doubt into the presence of real love for many people. Maybe the next step is to bring the usual “I do not trust you” factor, through previous relationship references, into the beginning stages of a relationship, since the normal method of dating and relationship-building already has a myriad of other checks, suspicions and quizzes. Or may be the scary golden path of testing everything by venturing through uncharted fields of love with a good heart can work too, regardless of the outcome.

What do you think?