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Scroll through any dating app and one wish appears more than almost any other: “You should make me laugh.”
It sounds harmless—charming, even. Who doesn’t want laughter in a relationship? But listen closely to the grammar. You should make me laugh. One person performs; the other receives. One is the comedian; the other is the audience. Before the first date has even happened, the job description assigns your future partner a role: supplier of your good moods.
The wish for laughter is healthy. The outsourcing hidden inside it is not.
What the Research Actually Says About Laughter and Love
Laughter genuinely matters in romantic relationships—but not in the way the dating-profile phrase implies. In a study of couples, Kurtz and Algoe (2015) found that the amount of time partners spent laughing together predicted relationship quality and feelings of closeness. It was the shared moment—two nervous systems in sync—that carried the benefit.
A meta-analysis of 39 studies reached the same conclusion from another direction: Hall (2017) found that relationship satisfaction was linked to humor that partners create and appreciate jointly—inside jokes, playful exchanges—rather than to either partner’s individual funniness. Being a comedy talent, it turns out, is not what predicts a happy couple. Laughing at the same things is.
In other words: The research supports wanting laughter in your relationship. It does not support hiring someone to produce it for you.
The Problem With Outsourcing Your Mood
“Make me laugh” is a small example of a larger pattern psychologists have been tracking for years: the tendency to hand a romantic partner responsibility for regulating our emotional lives.
Finkel and colleagues (2014) describe how modern partnership has absorbed roles once spread across an entire community—best friend, therapist, entertainer, motivational coach. They argue that expecting one person to meet needs at every level, without investing correspondingly more in the relationship, leaves many couples “suffocating.” It asks more of marriage than most marriages can deliver.
The happiness research adds a second problem. A substantial share of our day-to-day happiness is governed by intentional activity—what we choose to do, notice, and cultivate—rather than by our circumstances, including who we’re dating (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005). Self-determination theory reaches a similar verdict: Well-being rests on needs such as autonomy and competence that, by definition, no one can satisfy on your behalf (Deci & Ryan, 2000).
If your baseline joy is a job you’ve assigned to someone else, two things follow. You have made your happiness contingent on another person’s daily performance. And you have handed them a task at which they are guaranteed, eventually, to fail—because no partner is funny on demand, forever, at the end of their own hard days.
The Audience Problem
There is also a quieter cost. An audience evaluates. When your partner’s role is to entertain you, their off days become disappointments, and your attention shifts from being with them to reviewing them. Few things are less romantic than a performance review.
And consider the position it puts the other person in. They fell in love; they did not audition. A relationship in which one person is responsible for the weather and the other merely reports on it is not a partnership. It is a service arrangement with affection attached.
The One-Word Fix
None of this means you should delete laughter from your wish list. It means changing one word.
Not: someone who makes me laugh. Instead: someone I laugh with.
The revision looks cosmetic. It is structural. “With” turns joy from something delivered into something co-created. It matches what the research finds actually predicts satisfaction—shared humor, mutual play. And it changes what you look for on those first dates: not “Is this person entertaining me?” but “Do we find the same things funny? Is something light and playful happening between us?”
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That second question, incidentally, is far better at detecting compatibility. Plenty of people can be charming for an evening. Whether laughter arises between you is much harder to fake.
Govern Your Own Weather First
The deeper preparation for partnership, then, is not finding a funnier candidate. It is becoming a person whose baseline contentment is self-governed: cultivating your own sources of amusement, play, and meaning, so that a partner’s humor is a gift you enjoy rather than a supply you depend on.
People who arrive at a relationship already in decent emotional weather have more to offer and less to demand. They can be delighted by a partner without being dependent on one. And—the pleasant irony—they tend to laugh more with their partners, because shared laughter flourishes precisely where nobody is under pressure to produce it.
So keep laughter on the list. Just rewrite the item. You are not casting a comedian. You are looking for someone to sit beside while the two of you find the world funny together.
