2) I laughed when I saw that, talk about the most American possible way to end this post. In the genre of "I'm having kidney surgery so will be slow to reply to emails for the next few hours."
Counter-example: One time I had a virtual first date with a girl, we played Minecraft together. We both had a good time, I came out wanting more, she told me that the Minecraft date had made her realize we weren't compatible for some reason.
So the Minecraft magic is powerful, but it's not quite omnipotent.
Sounds like it's doing important revealing work on compatibility, and I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you with that particular woman, but better to find out early than late?
Did you want to continue to be in a relationship with someone who turned out just not to like you? Because I spent a couple of years in a relationship with someone I just didn’t like. I don’t think she pines for me, considering she dumped me over the phone on her birthday.
My husband, who games, has the exact same attitude as you here. He's pretty happy with me being ignorant about but affirming of his gaming (he thought he might have to quit upon finding a woman to marry). For my part, I have no interest in playing video games, but I sometimes enjoy watching him play some action adventure ones. I have fun also looking up whatever game he's playing and finding forums of people talking about it and reading their opinions off to him as if they were mine. His responses are always hilarious in large part because he also knows that I have no idea what the people in the gaming forum are talking about.
I don't know how this man does all the things he does. Like seriously how can you write this much, have a job and play videogames. I do not understand.
Yes -- you could have made this a lot more clear!! Maybe edit in "mutual friend Aella" or something like that? The eye skims ahead to the the tweet image.
Me also, I guess when you read the first sentence you start looking for the wife and then you see the screenshot and it kinda fills the information hole or something
Congratulations! My wife and I also played online games together while remote dating for a bit, although the cause was my work and her school in different states. It's always nice to know that your relationship can flourish without the easy fixes of physical proximity.
Congratulations :) as one of the aforementioned people who've been reading the blog ever since it was about how impossible it was to have a date, I'm really happy about this.
(Also thank you; I've been depressed about dating lately and this gives me some hope).
I used Hinge and eventually, after its algorithms learned my preferences, seem to have found someone really quite spookily compatible with me. You should try it.
I have tried it (actually got a date for this weekend through it). It's weirdly inconsistent in quality (ranges from giving me twenty suggestions in a row who are overtly wrong to, earlier this week, showing me my ex), but it does give you a nontrivial number of micromarriages.
Many congratulations, Scott - and, as someone married for 47 years, 1) have the difficult conversations 2) acknowledge when you've got it wrong & 3) be prepared to laugh at yourself.
Can you give an idea of what those terms mean for non-knowers? From context I assume it's something like object-level meanings, versus more universal generalized lessons, something like that...?
Good for you! That metaphor of sliding into a black hole with increasing feelings of dread and bitterness, or a newly-born star with increasing feelings of euphoria and amazement, is pretty apt. Been through the first one, and have had hints of the second one - but like you said, it's worth the persistence. Best wishes for the future.
Yes! We need your genes preserved. Maybe 8 kids? (My first child is due this month and I'm trying to get other people to have children to assuage my fear(s))
It's not nearly as bad as the world makes it out to be. You'll feel like you're never going to adjust to the sleep-loss, and then suddenly your body adjusts for you.
Congratulations! I got married last year to the first guy I ever dated - and we met when we were both putting our lunches in the fridge at my internship. He asked good questions about my research and then I started going to him to whiteboard algorithm problems and it snowballed from there.
Somehow it's hard for me to imagine "Scott, one of the brightest intellectuals and bloggers in the world", "Scott, a guy who attends weird naked parties", and "Scott, a man who takes the risk of marriage in 2022 driven by the metaphysical/romantic motivation" to be the same person, but I wish you all the best. :)
Do you not know any happily long term partnered (but unmarried) men? Or are they all really genuinely less happy seeming than the ones who decided to get married?
I ask because I see it as kind of trivially true that for people who prefer long term partnerships, being in one is a net happiness improvement.
But I don't see marriage as playing a significant role in that equation amongst the men in my social circle.
Congratulations! What a funny, interesting and very moving text! And thank you so much for the beautiful picture at the end :-) I wish you the very best and some more!
Congratulations! May you have many years of joy together.
Re: Dating. I tell people who get frustrated that dating is about failure. You go on dates, they don't work out. You fail. You learn from it. And eventually you stop failing and you settle down with the right person, and it's great. (I do envy the people who marry their high school sweethearts and live together forever.)
Re: Micromarriages. Good concept! To meet the right people you have to leave yourself open to opportunities, and seize them when they come up. In August of 2004 I sat down on a plane flight and started talking to a cute girl. In August of 2005 we got married and she moved across country to be with me. Seventeen years and five kids later we're managing quite well.
The last thing: Marriage is about commitment. Literally a do-or-die commitment. The commitment is the important part, because there are always rough spots. But when you're committed to each other then you know that person is always in your corner. You know there's always someone there to back you up, no matter how badly you've screwed up. So be forgiving of each others' flaws and work on building each other up. And then the sum of you is greater than the parts.
“The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.”
Congratulations. So glad to hear there is a Time for Everyone, not only a Time for Everything!
And you are right here as well:
"Darwin spends five billion years optimizing your genes for reproduction, and God laughs and decides that whether or not you mate will depend on which weird parties you go to."
(I met my wife for 30+ years at a party themed “Carnival in Hell”.)
Yes, mazel tov. Tied to the mast doesn't quite work here; the beauty is eminently worthwhile and indeed the odyssey itself, not a dangerous distraction off course. Best wishes. Ben
That theory goes back a hell of a lot further than that -- all the way to the Pythagoreans, and from there to Plato, then to the Roman Neopythagoreans, etc.
In the 20th century, Konrad Zuse proposed a "mathematical universe" with "digital physics" in 1967. There were others, from Cantor to Stephen Wolfram, who proposed or surmised very similar (if not identical) things in the decades before and since.
Tegmark can take no credit for that concept, which is very old and indeed evergreen, and I don't think that he's fully considered the implications of what he has proposed.
Congratulations! Since you discussed the Odyssey, there are two parts of it that I always point out to my students, which I think are very romantic illustrations of marriage. The first is a typically pre-Platonic Greek sentiment--and quite contractual sounding--but rather lovely:
"Nothing is stronger or better than this:
when two people, united in purpose, make a home together.
It brings much pain to their enemies, but joy to their friends,
and they themselves know the greatest blessings." 6.182-185
And the second is the extraordinary simile that Homer gives us when Penelope and Odysseus are reunited:
"As welcome as
the land to swimmers, when Poseidon wrecks
their ship at sea and breaks it with great waves
and driving winds; a few escape the sea
and reach the shore, their skin all caked with brine.
Grateful to be alive, they crawl to land.
So glad she was to see her own dear husband,
and her white arms would not let go his neck.” 23.234-241-ish
Penelope is turned into Odysseus: she's the shipwrecked sailor who has made it safely to land. Their marriage makes them both equals and counterparts, each the sailor and the land.
+1
1) Congratulations!
2) I laughed when I saw that, talk about the most American possible way to end this post. In the genre of "I'm having kidney surgery so will be slow to reply to emails for the next few hours."
Mazel Tov!
"Then COVID hit. We switched our dates to a Minecraft virtual world, where we built a house together." - great
So what I'm getting from this is I need to get Minecraft if I want to get married...
Yupp, seems accurate
Bonus points if two of you share a server on which you build a fake runway.
Counter-example: One time I had a virtual first date with a girl, we played Minecraft together. We both had a good time, I came out wanting more, she told me that the Minecraft date had made her realize we weren't compatible for some reason.
So the Minecraft magic is powerful, but it's not quite omnipotent.
Sounds like it's doing important revealing work on compatibility, and I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you with that particular woman, but better to find out early than late?
Did you want to continue to be in a relationship with someone who turned out just not to like you? Because I spent a couple of years in a relationship with someone I just didn’t like. I don’t think she pines for me, considering she dumped me over the phone on her birthday.
Be thankful the relationship ended there.
Back in the day, I used to say, "The couple that WoWs together, stays together."
Go on ...
Oh wow, but what game, though? (If you're comfortable sharing here)
My husband, who games, has the exact same attitude as you here. He's pretty happy with me being ignorant about but affirming of his gaming (he thought he might have to quit upon finding a woman to marry). For my part, I have no interest in playing video games, but I sometimes enjoy watching him play some action adventure ones. I have fun also looking up whatever game he's playing and finding forums of people talking about it and reading their opinions off to him as if they were mine. His responses are always hilarious in large part because he also knows that I have no idea what the people in the gaming forum are talking about.
My wife met her ex-boyfriend in wow.
That’s because nobody else wants to fuck either of them, though.
Although the “kabbalistic significance” of it seems pretty pretentious.
I mean, he wrote a fictional book about kabbalists, so I suspect that's an inside joke.
It’s a reference to the free novel he published about a world where Kabbalah is literally true.
My second date with my husband was explicitly "let's get drunk and play Minecraft." Best decision I ever made.
All good wishes to you both xx
I don't know how this man does all the things he does. Like seriously how can you write this much, have a job and play videogames. I do not understand.
Congratulations!
Congratulations! So delighted for you. Marriage is great.
Congratulations. Welcome to married life and the on-going chance to continually make a better and better partnership with another human being.
Congrats!
For whatever coincidental (or not coincidental) reason: I had never heard of her. But in the past week or so, she's been all over my Twitter feed.
I didn't marry Aella!
Yes -- you could have made this a lot more clear!! Maybe edit in "mutual friend Aella" or something like that? The eye skims ahead to the the tweet image.
Do you see how marriage suits Scott? Your wish is his command.
The eye skims ahead to the word 'tweet' (ignoring the second 'the'). Haha.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/
For some reason, I too thought you were marrying Aella, haha. Whoops!
Congratulations, may you enjoy the siren song to its fullest. :)
I did too for a second but because I've seen her twitter feed and was pretty sure she was single I did a double-take and re-read it more carefully.
Ah. Oops.
Well, congrats still stands!
I figured that out from the photo. You two look cute together. And super congratulations!
I also thought this at first.
I also thought this at first, even with the edit.
Me also, I guess when you read the first sentence you start looking for the wife and then you see the screenshot and it kinda fills the information hole or something
Congratulations Scott! Really happy for you both
Congratulations! My wife and I also played online games together while remote dating for a bit, although the cause was my work and her school in different states. It's always nice to know that your relationship can flourish without the easy fixes of physical proximity.
Aw, that’s lovely. Congratulations!
Congratulations!
Congratulations and good luck to both of you! :)
Congratulations!
Congrats!!
Congratulations :) as one of the aforementioned people who've been reading the blog ever since it was about how impossible it was to have a date, I'm really happy about this.
(Also thank you; I've been depressed about dating lately and this gives me some hope).
I used Hinge and eventually, after its algorithms learned my preferences, seem to have found someone really quite spookily compatible with me. You should try it.
I have tried it (actually got a date for this weekend through it). It's weirdly inconsistent in quality (ranges from giving me twenty suggestions in a row who are overtly wrong to, earlier this week, showing me my ex), but it does give you a nontrivial number of micromarriages.
OMG! I ran across my ex on Hinge, and immediately locked my profile. (I’m genuinely happy that she’s getting back out there and looking.)
Congratulations, and best wishes for the future.
Congratulations!
Many congratulations, Scott - and, as someone married for 47 years, 1) have the difficult conversations 2) acknowledge when you've got it wrong & 3) be prepared to laugh at yourself.
Congratulations! I hope you both enjoy the honeymoon, and don't worry about posting, we'll still be here afterwards :)
Wow! Congrats! I'm really happy for the two of you :)
Congratulations!
Congrats!
Mazel Tov!
But I don't think you're using pshat, remez, and sod right.
That said, your drasha on Odysseus is excellent.
Can you give an idea of what those terms mean for non-knowers? From context I assume it's something like object-level meanings, versus more universal generalized lessons, something like that...?
In the original context of a bible passage:
Pshat: the literal meaning
Remez: Something that is alluded to.
Drash: Something that can be derived, eg. from repetition or word choice
Sod: Some deep esoteric secret underlyingthing (unsurprisingly this is mostly from a kabbalistic context, whereas pshat and drash predate kabbalah)
Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has an article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardes_%28Jewish_exegesis%29?wprov=sfla1
Thanks, in retrospect I should've figured that out.
Yay, this is lovely and uplifting. Many congratulations.
Congratulations!
Awww! Mazel Tov!
Congratulations Scott!
Good for you! That metaphor of sliding into a black hole with increasing feelings of dread and bitterness, or a newly-born star with increasing feelings of euphoria and amazement, is pretty apt. Been through the first one, and have had hints of the second one - but like you said, it's worth the persistence. Best wishes for the future.
Congrats. Now go make some babies - we need babies.
Came here to say this.
Yes! We need your genes preserved. Maybe 8 kids? (My first child is due this month and I'm trying to get other people to have children to assuage my fear(s))
Congratulations!!!
It's not nearly as bad as the world makes it out to be. You'll feel like you're never going to adjust to the sleep-loss, and then suddenly your body adjusts for you.
Counterpoint: It was much, much, much worse than I thought it would be, and I thought sleep deprivation would be bad.
Depends a lot on your kid.
Congratulations! I got married last year to the first guy I ever dated - and we met when we were both putting our lunches in the fridge at my internship. He asked good questions about my research and then I started going to him to whiteboard algorithm problems and it snowballed from there.
Congratulations!
Somehow it's hard for me to imagine "Scott, one of the brightest intellectuals and bloggers in the world", "Scott, a guy who attends weird naked parties", and "Scott, a man who takes the risk of marriage in 2022 driven by the metaphysical/romantic motivation" to be the same person, but I wish you all the best. :)
Do you not know any happily long term partnered (but unmarried) men? Or are they all really genuinely less happy seeming than the ones who decided to get married?
I ask because I see it as kind of trivially true that for people who prefer long term partnerships, being in one is a net happiness improvement.
But I don't see marriage as playing a significant role in that equation amongst the men in my social circle.
Honestly, that all seems to fit my mental model of Scott pretty well lol
And mine.
Congratulations! May you have many happy years together.
Congratulations! What a funny, interesting and very moving text! And thank you so much for the beautiful picture at the end :-) I wish you the very best and some more!
I never bothered to read through other websites to see his picture so this was the first I saw him. He's no longer an amorphous cipher in my head.
WHAT OMG YAYAYAY
Congrats, you beautiful humans! <3
Congrats, wishing you all the best
Congrats Scott! I'm so happy for you two. Lots of love!
Congratulations! So happy for you both. :)
Congratulations!
Love this. Congratulations and thank you for sharing. My 20 year anniversary is in April. Marriage/Long Term Partnership is a worthwhile journey.
Congratulations!
congratulations!
Congratulations to you both! I wish you a long and happy life together.
Congratulations!
Congratulations! May you have many years of joy together.
Re: Dating. I tell people who get frustrated that dating is about failure. You go on dates, they don't work out. You fail. You learn from it. And eventually you stop failing and you settle down with the right person, and it's great. (I do envy the people who marry their high school sweethearts and live together forever.)
Re: Micromarriages. Good concept! To meet the right people you have to leave yourself open to opportunities, and seize them when they come up. In August of 2004 I sat down on a plane flight and started talking to a cute girl. In August of 2005 we got married and she moved across country to be with me. Seventeen years and five kids later we're managing quite well.
The last thing: Marriage is about commitment. Literally a do-or-die commitment. The commitment is the important part, because there are always rough spots. But when you're committed to each other then you know that person is always in your corner. You know there's always someone there to back you up, no matter how badly you've screwed up. So be forgiving of each others' flaws and work on building each other up. And then the sum of you is greater than the parts.
To quote Chesterton (again):
“The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.”
Congrats!
Congratulations. So glad to hear there is a Time for Everyone, not only a Time for Everything!
And you are right here as well:
"Darwin spends five billion years optimizing your genes for reproduction, and God laughs and decides that whether or not you mate will depend on which weird parties you go to."
(I met my wife for 30+ years at a party themed “Carnival in Hell”.)
Mazal tov! And thank you for this funny, insightful and romantic post, which was immediately shared with my shipmate :)
Congratulations!!! I hope you have a nice honeymoon.
Very happy to hear! May you marriage be fruitfull and filled with joy!
Yes, mazel tov. Tied to the mast doesn't quite work here; the beauty is eminently worthwhile and indeed the odyssey itself, not a dangerous distraction off course. Best wishes. Ben
Congrats!
So that's what you look like!
Nah, it’s probably a stock photo, since he’s an internet person and probably doesn’t have a corporeal form. ;)
I met him and can confirm he's made out of 1s and 0s*.
*Because the entire universe is actually a mathematical object per Max Tegmark.
That theory goes back a hell of a lot further than that -- all the way to the Pythagoreans, and from there to Plato, then to the Roman Neopythagoreans, etc.
In the 20th century, Konrad Zuse proposed a "mathematical universe" with "digital physics" in 1967. There were others, from Cantor to Stephen Wolfram, who proposed or surmised very similar (if not identical) things in the decades before and since.
Tegmark can take no credit for that concept, which is very old and indeed evergreen, and I don't think that he's fully considered the implications of what he has proposed.
Congratulations. This post might be my favorite that you’ve written.
Well I’m charmed!
Best wishes to our host and his beloved!
The combination of the title and the photo made me cry. I needed that. Congratulations to both of you, this is amazing!
Mazal Tov!
Congrats! Also, could someone please explain the kabbalistic significance of building a house together with someone in minecraft?
Hmm... I had always read Minecraft as referring to mining, but perhaps it refers to "making something mine" -- or someone!
(also they literally made house together, which is probably what he meant)
Congratulations! Since you discussed the Odyssey, there are two parts of it that I always point out to my students, which I think are very romantic illustrations of marriage. The first is a typically pre-Platonic Greek sentiment--and quite contractual sounding--but rather lovely:
"Nothing is stronger or better than this:
when two people, united in purpose, make a home together.
It brings much pain to their enemies, but joy to their friends,
and they themselves know the greatest blessings." 6.182-185
And the second is the extraordinary simile that Homer gives us when Penelope and Odysseus are reunited:
"As welcome as
the land to swimmers, when Poseidon wrecks
their ship at sea and breaks it with great waves
and driving winds; a few escape the sea
and reach the shore, their skin all caked with brine.
Grateful to be alive, they crawl to land.
So glad she was to see her own dear husband,
and her white arms would not let go his neck.” 23.234-241-ish
Penelope is turned into Odysseus: she's the shipwrecked sailor who has made it safely to land. Their marriage makes them both equals and counterparts, each the sailor and the land.
Anyway, wishing you all happiness!
מזל טוב!
Congratulations!
Congratulations Scott! As a long time reader, I'm delighted to hear you found someone to take a shot at marriage with. :)
Congratulations, and best wishes to you both, Scott!