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.
Congratulations Scott! Been following you since the LJ days, under alternating pseudonyms, so feel like I know you in am odd parasocial way. So happy that you are happy
> Is it possible to like someone so much that the positive emotion builds on itself, grows stronger and stronger with every interaction, until it’s one of those blue supergiant stars in the galactic core?
As someone who's been married nearly 21 years, I'd say yes, this is definitely possible. My wife and I get along very, very well. We fight, of course, but mostly we just enjoy each other's company. I definitely find some of her very normal behaviors very adorable, and I'm sure no other person would have the same reaction to these behaviors of hers.
I feel pretty lucky to have found _a_ right person to get married to (neither of believe in soulmates).
I very much agree with Dave. I also don't believe in soulmates, but after 17 years with my wife, I definitely feel very strongly about growing together. It was the thing I felt most was missing in this otherwise very cheery post: growth not like stars but like plants, growth as an organic process. Contracts and precommitment not as mechanisms but as trellises. More inosculating and and pollarding than delimiting and delineating. The more you think of you the couple as one entity and interact with the world as if that were true, the stronger your relationship becomes.
But I do think some trellis work is good early on. When you're getting started especially, meet each other 2/3 of the way, not 1/2 the way. If you commit to only 1/2 the way and either one of you underestimates the distance between your positions even a little, you'll never meet in the middle at all. Also, when you personally make a mistake, it's your mistake, but if she does, it's our mistake. If she has a good idea, make sure she gets the hat tip/citation, but when you do, be less stressed about credit. Gestures of positive credit-sharing like that bring you closer.
Agree with this. Things I found irksome in my husband month 1 of the marriage are adorable to me by now (year 7) because they're part of the parcel of who he is.
Congratulations! I don't know what the kabalistic symbolism for building a house together would be, but the straightforward symbolism is very straightforward.
Okay, seriously, what kind of person announces his marriage and then makes most of the announcement about soul-sucking messes and the exigencies of tying oneself to the mast in order to stay married? Why is it a good idea to explain all of that *in your wedding announcement*? We are all delighted if you're delighted. Congratulations. Let me know if you need a romance coach. Sounds like you need one.
The "I love you" that comes late, after great deliberation, carries more weight than the "I love you" that blows in and out again with every stray gust of wind.
If you're the sort of person who values such weight, such gravity, then there is great romance in somebody marrying you, while carrying great suspicion and reservation about marriage itself.
This is precisely correct. It shows an adult and clear eyed perspective on the state of marriage - 'can be terrible, but hey look, *with you*, it has the potential to be really, really great as well'.
What, you don't think marriage involves ropes and bondage? (insert Groucho Marx eyebrow waggle here).
Look, marriage is great but it's also tough. There are temptations, there are things that wear away at it, there are pitfalls. So you have to tie yourself to the mast and go "No, I have something else to do that is more important to me than getting eaten by sirens" in order to stick it out, but then if you do, you get to slaughter importunate suitors and pet your old dog just before it dies.
Then you and your equally clever and wise wife will test one another with words, then weep in each other's arms, and then go to rest in the famous marriage-bed once more in peace and happiness.
We wrote our own vows and of course showed them to the other beforehand. She was very concerned that mine said things like, "I can't promise I will always love you but I will always try." It didn't sound at all romantic. I told her why I wanted to say it; she agreed to leave it in; and forty years later, I sometimes feel like we're crazy in love.
What kind of person criticizes the writing of someone's marriage announcement on the day it's made? I'd say it's characteristic of how Scott thinks; presumably his spouse is someone who's happy with that way of thinking. It's nobody else's business whether it looks romantic enough. (Though I find Odysseus and the sirens an appealing analogy, and as Scott says better to put the rumination here than in the wedding itself.)
>>Why is it a good idea to explain all of that *in your wedding announcement*? <<
Funny thing: it seemed perfectly natural to me.
Perhaps this is a clue:
>>so far there’s no standardized Rationalist liturgy. <<
Two rationalists decide to marry their fortunes together. Should we be surprised that at least one of them is fascinated by the logic of the process (and confident that his lengthy explication will not offend the other)?
Some people find protracted discussion of the pro and cons of marriage, the mechanics of commitment and the rationality of loving the person you love romantic.
It's good precisely because anyone who has ever been married understands that Scott knows exactly what he's getting into - I've officiated several of my friends' weddings and the urge to "caution" as well as "taking care" is an important part of the marital obligation. Any major endeavor should be entered not only with giddy optimism but also "in fear and trembling" (to steal from Kierkegaard) for it to have the best chance of success.
Almost every wedding I've been to (especially the "mature" ones where the betrothed were both over 30) included comments and metaphors to that effect in the proceedings or vows. Announcing that you want to physically bind yourself to your marriage in order to help you stay in it is good proof that you're dedicated. It's not distasteful or unromantic. Some weddings even include a ritual of tying bride and groom's hands together with phsyical rope! If you're making a committment, why not make it clear that you're doing everything possible to keep yourself to your committment?
You know, I was going to make a joke about airline manufacturing contracts not being the most romantic metaphor, but then you hit me with that "the feeling of love is like the siren's song" analogy and I nearly swooned.
One of my favorite descriptions of marriage came from Ira Glass on This American Life. He was talking with someone who absolutely refused to ever consider getting married, because he was terrified of being stuck or losing freedoms. Ira said that to him, the permanence of marriage was a feature, not a bug. Having someone that you *know* will always be with you is a tremendous comfort. No matter what may come, you won't have to face it alone; you're inescapably bound to this other person.
Of course a year or two later he ended up getting divorced, but I still find his vision to be very comforting.
I've always been fascinated by the shocked and dismayed description of marriage by Philip Larkin (who was constitutionally allergic to the idea of marriage): "He married a woman to stop her getting away / Now she's there all day." I'm fascinated by it because it is so utterly alien to the way I think, or you think, or Ira Glass thinks.
Yeah I've never had any ability to understand some folks terror at the idea of marriage. Especially since many of them don't appear to be using any of the freedoms they would lose by entering into a marriage in the first place!
Well, in Philip Larkin's case, the freedom he would have lost by getting married was the freedom to string two (or more!) girlfriends along simultaneously literally for decades, each hoping that he'd marry her. Larkin was a great poet but not a very admirable person.
I'm curious, how does being married work with polyamory? You mentioned you were dating a biosecurity grad student, is that your wife or a different person?
(It's fine if you don't want to discuss this publicly but I was just curious.)
My wife and I are both poly and we have an open relationship. The biosecurity grad student is a different person (although my wife helped put on a biosecurity conference, so I guess I have a type).
I hope this correctly comes off as baffled rather than judgey, but I have trouble understanding exactly what this means. How will your life be different going forward?
(To validate my lack of judginess, I will say that my wife and I lived together monogamously for a decade and a half before we married, and more than one friend allowed as how they had thought we were *already* married. And in some ways it’s hard for me to explain what’s different now, after two decades of marriage. But I’m really happy we did it.)
In any case, like everyone else here, I offer congratulations and shared happiness.
The most common arrangements are 1) emotional monogamy (no getting intimate with other people, no taking them out on dates etc., just having friends, some of whom are with benefits) and 2) full-fledged polyamory (you have primary, secondary, tertiary partners and there are arrangements as to what is permitted with whom).
(Well, the most common type of nonmonogamy is promising monogamy and cheating. But that’s not quite relevant.)
Consider the part of the post about marriage being a contract, a commitment. If you're poly and you're married, you've made that "'til death do us part" commitment to probably just one person, even if you have multiple partners.
The main way our life is different is that we'll be trying for children.
Otherwise, like you say, since we've already tested out living together and spending most of our time / emotional energy with each other, we jumped the gun a bit and there won't be too much difference.
Good for you! Poly is one of the few things that are both very rational and very exciting (if done right). Good luck with your next million micromarriages! :)
Micromarriages, huh. I spent ten years folk-dancing, which is a great way to meet people of the opposite sex, before I met her who would become my wife. If I'd thought of it as micromarriages, I would probably have given up. I was there because I liked the dancing. Dating someone I'd met there, which didn't happen until after I accidentally ran into her somewhere else, was not on my radar, thank goodness.
I, in contrast, was at folk dancing precisely for the micromarriages, having been advised by a colleague's wife that it was a good place to meet girls.
If I'd been there to "meet girls" instead of to dance, several undesirable things would have followed: 1) I would have gotten frustrated as ten years passed without any result; 2) I would have enjoyed the dancing less as my attention focused on the futile process; 3) I would have been less popular as my ulterior motive would have been detected. (I am not a master of subtlety.) Your mileage may vary, but that would have been mine.
ok you're implying there is a relevant difference there, but you don't say what it is. meeting potential partners is one of the main functions of social events. perhaps particularly dancing. it is not ulterior (unless you don't even like dancing, and are just pretending to, and perhaps David's post sounds a bit like that)
I don't much like dancing but I wasn't pretending to like it, I was doing my best to participate. As my wife puts it, from her observation, when they did a simple dance I followed, a little off the beat, and when they did a complicated dance I followed, a little off the beat."
I had done a good deal of unenthusaistic dance in the SCA, dance being one of my first wife's interests. It is also one of my second wife's interests. One of the ways in which she was better suited to the role was that she figured out early on that I wasn't a dancer and made no attempt to get me to participate. Now when the local group does a dance ball, with my wife providing music and our daughter dancing and teaching, I am in the kitchen of the building producing period apple fritters for people.
>Your mileage may vary, but that would have been mine.
I eventually gave up folk dancing, partly because I kept falling in love with persons I hardly knew and who had given me no indication that they were pleased!
I agree that dancing is a great way to "meet girls" - it worked very well for me. I also agree with Kalimac that it's better to have that be a side effect, but it works so well that David's approach also worked for him. Doesn't have to be folk dancing, could be any type of dancing.
Stereotype alert - notice it's all men seeking women.
Suggestion for David Friedma(n) - try deleting your substack account and creating a new one, maybe you can get back your missing letter.
I think relationship and dating advice is an epistemic wasteland. I've interviewed "successful" couples, and they don't even really know how they ended up there. But, there are idea clusters in the space, and one of them is that "living your best life" is an optimal strategy. You're right, the micro-marriage mindset would probably backfire or at best be exhausting, but directionally I think Scott's post is a roundabout re-iteration of, "live your best life, good things will happen." The micro-marriage thing is probably retroactive modeling of how it all panned out.
Eh, there are a lot of folks who's default "best life" involves meeting approximately no new people ever - I like the friends I have and find meeting new people exhausting. Dating needs to be a conscious strategy for people like that, and "micro-marriages" is a useful concept (though I'm not sold on the word).
Yes, I should have clarified that while I've noticed a cluster around the "live your best life" strategy, I myself am questioning whether that's always right for everyone.
To your point, there's also the saying, "love discriminates against the shy," which is a slam-dunk mechanically, no RCT required. Also related: a frequently upvoted response on Ask Metafilter about finding someone is "drink more."
At the end of the day, it's a numbers game, all the way down, I guess.
Well, just interviewing random couples would be as usual as interviewing a dozen of people who were ill and then cured and try to build a whole human biology and medicine theory from that. The field is way too vast for such approach to be useful. Some things - like "if you don't meet any new people then you'd have hard time meeting your future marriage partner" is on the level "if you're going to put your foot in the fire, it's probably gonna hurt" - but moving from such obvious stuff to deeper insights may require something more.
Congratulations! You got married in the same week as a friend from another internet sphere -- good signs all around. Wishing you and your wife joy and wonders.
Also because I am totally that guy and this is totally the only community where nobody will look at me oddly for this:
"All you need to do is go to a thousand parties and you have a 50-50 chance of meeting the right person! Maybe that number would sound more encouraging if it was lower"
(1999/2000)^1000 =~0.606
So at 500 micromarriages per party you'd need to attend 1386 before you passed the 50% point.
At 4500 parties there's still a 10% chance of no marriage.
At 9125 parties there's still more than 1% chance of no marriage.
So assuming a flat 500 micromarriages per party, if you start with 100 people who want to find a partner and they party nightly, 365 nights per year from age 18 through to age 43 there's still going to be like one guy who's just like "I'm so tired of partying, so very tired."
Non-additivity of micromarriages (and micromorts, for that matter) works out with the likely fact that micromarriages for a given instance of an activity is probably an increasing (likely sublinearly, but still) function relative to your cumulative total of micromarriages: you learn more about what seems to work, you learn more about yourself (likely including, to be clear, what prior must-haves aren't so important), and your experiences (or your presentation thereof...) tend to make yourself more appealing.
This is really heart-warming and I've very happy for you.
I'm slowly realising that if I want to ever end up in a relationship I'm going to have to actually do something rather than just waiting for it to happen, and the micro-marriages framing seems like a useful motivational thing.
Online dating, if you find the right platform, does actually work well. My big piece of advice is that the various different sites and apps have radically different userbases, so you are better served by trying a dozen looking for one where you get lots of good matches rather than stubbornly sticking with one that doesn't work. (It took me 2 wasted years to figure that one out)
I mean, unless you literally do nothing but sit in your room waiting for relationship to happen (which, I know, actually perfectly common in the COVID era), the micro-marriages framing would seem to suggest that you're accumulating them naturally simply by living your life. It may help you conceptualize optimization strategies, and motivate you to keep on living life instead of getting depressed and never leaving your room, but as far as "you have to do something" goes, it seems to imply the exact opposite. There's no particular thing that can be done, you just naturally do thousands little rolls of dice, several a day, each with a minuscule chance of success.
I'm speaking here as someone who neither intended to get married nor accumulated particularly many micro-marriage points throughout my life (I am depressed, not-leaving-my-room-for-weeks depressed at times, however little you think you've got, I'm most likely worse), yet somehow still ended up with a romantic partner. Most people eventually roll well, the crucial part appears to be following up and not rejecting the opportunity when it presents itself.
I interpreted the micromarriages framing as essentially 'go out and meet people'. Obviously if you sit in your room all day you're probably not going to meet anyone, but there are plenty of hobbies people are into that also are unlikely to produce many 'micromarriages' either (for example, taking long hikes alone).
As someone who accumulates essentially zero micromarriages (I work from home and in my spare time mostly hang out with the same group of college friends, all of whom are men), I definitely think that I would have more luck if I proactively went out and started doing things that involved talking to many women my own age.
In the great marriage tradition of unsolicited advice, the best most succinct marriage advice I've seen is "love is a choice, not a feeling". Almost every marriage has "bitch eating crackers" moments - and a key is that the basis of the marriage can't be positive feelings: you have to choose to continue showing love to your spouse even when the positive feelings aren't there.
In Non-Violent Communication they say "love is a need, not a feeling". You can feel close warm feelings at times, but not realistically all the time. I agree there will always be very bad moments, and it's good to expect them and overcome them, and try to minimize their occurrence.
Many congratulations and best wishes to you both! Long life and great happiness, and may it go well! Kindly accept this virtual throwing of confetti, rice, and old shoes 😁
Marriage is a big step and it takes courage, so you both have done a brave thing. You are linking yourselves as one more link in the great chain that connects families and peoples and societies all the way back into the past, and helping carry that on into the future.
Don't worry about marrying at 37; my father was 35 and my mother was 31 when they married and they ended up with four of us kids (I admit, I am not the greatest inducement for "and here's a potential offspring" but your roll of the genetic dice, should you both decide to have children, will undoubtedly go a lot better).
Since you mentioned Chesterton, I'll also presume your wedding day went more smoothly (though maybe not more happily) than his:
"A man does not generally manage to forget his wedding-day; especially such a highly comic wedding-day as mine. For the family remembers against me a number of now familiar legends, about the missing of trains, the losing of luggage, and other things counted yet more eccentric. It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself; and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller. They seemed to me the most natural things in the world. I did not buy the pistol to murder myself or my wife; I never was really modern. I bought it because it was the great adventure of my youth, with a general notion of protecting her from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads, to which we were bound; where, after all, there are still a suspiciously large number of families with Danish names. I shall not be annoyed if it is called childish; but obviously it was rather a reminiscence of boyhood, and not of childhood. But the ritual consumption of the glass of milk really was a reminiscence of childhood. I stopped at that particular dairy because I had always drunk a glass of milk there when walking with my mother in my infancy."
Tolkien has a more pragmatic view, because making a marriage work *is* hard work:
"Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the 'real soul-mate' is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstance do most of it (though if there is a God these must be His instruments, or His appearances). It is notorious that in fact happy marriages are more common where the 'choosing' by the young persons is even more limited, by parental or family authority, as long as there is a social ethic of plain unromantic responsibility and conjugal fidelity. But even in countries where the romantic tradition has so far affected social arrangements as to make people believe that the choosing of a mate is solely the concern of the young, only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were 'destined' for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life (yet the greatest of these tales do not tell of the happy marriage of such great lovers, but of their tragic separation; as if even in this sphere the truly great and splendid in this fallen world is more nearly achieved by 'failure' and suffering). In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world."
May you both be happy, may you both be content, may you both be a strength and support to the other during the troubles of life.
Mazel Tov! I'm so happy for you! May you have prosperity and joy and a the family you want! And yes, being hopelessly in love *can* last. I still stare at my partner while he sleeps, and we've been together for 14 years.
I'm an anti-marriage rationalist myself. I don't need a contract to maintain loving commitment to my partner. We've been engaged (as we define it, which is a level of commitment beyond dating) for 22 years. Made easier by deciding to not have kids.
If we were to have had kids, a contract would have had been far more prudent, and more likely to have happened, however.
Each of my financial accounts has her as the beneficiary, so the vast amount of my finances will seamlessly transfer to her in the case of my untimely demise.
We have made no arrangements for medical practices. I suppose a living will could help with at least part of that. I don't think you need to be married to afford access to designated representatives. Also, people tend to be reasonable. When they learn that we're long-term partners, I suspect people will do the right thing most of the time. And, even if not, I suppose my father would be contacted (or brother when my dad passes) and they would bring her in anyway to decision-making.
Ultimately, though, as you can see, I don't live my life to optimize for the government process of marriage rights and privileges. There's no doubt that we live in a system that encourages and rewards marriage. I get it because it provides additional social fabric cohesion, but I also happen to think it's coercive.
A few years ago, I was sitting on an airplane next to an airplane engineer of some sort (I don't remember the specifics). As was my wont, I asked him what's new in his industry, and he started talking about how one of the engine manufacturers recently announced they had a new design that would save on fuel costs by ~20%. He said normal incremental improvements weren't usually enough to spur new airplane purchases by airlines, but that this was big enough to drive some relatively large airplane orders.
This in turn set off a sort of 'bidding war' with the other two major engine manufacturers, who had to figure out how to also achieve a ~20% fuel reduction or miss out on the new round of plane orders.
I asked him how they managed to do that. Presumably, if they already knew how to squeeze an extra 20% fuel economy they would have. He said they did the same thing the first company did: they lied.
Or rather, they got some engineers to put together an engine that could 'theoretically' get 20% better fuel economy, but as is normal in the industry they sold it all without even a working prototype. That's because the engine, to work, would need to ignore a few minor details like the melting point of some of the materials it was made of. The practical engineers who would need to implement the design would have to completely overhaul the whole thing in order to even begin to make it work.
Since they would never be able to deliver what they promised, they wrote concessions into the contract. The airlines didn't EXPECT to get what they were promised, but they weren't going to pay for something less when it was delivered so the contract made sure they were compensated to the degree the manufacturer under-delivered.
This gave the manufacturer the incentive to try and provide as close as possible what they originally promised. After a few years of iterating, they would eventually get to the 20% improvement, but not until a lot of planes were already delivered.
I don't know if someone else here is more familiar with this process, but something about it feels apt to me in a post about marriage. Lots of excitement early on about major promises for future improvements. Later failure to deliver all that was promised (despite attempts to do so) because the promise was unrealistically high. Then, over time, the product is improved to the point where the original promise is finally realized. As someone who has over a decade of marriage under his belt, this feels like a good analogy.
I think in "increasing my cross section", which may be something similar to micromarriages.
"In physics, the cross section is a measure of the probability that a specific process will take place when some kind of radiant excitation (e.g. a particle beam, sound wave, light, or an X-ray) intersects a localized phenomenon (e.g. a particle or density fluctuation). For example, the Rutherford cross-section is a measure of probability that an alpha particle will be deflected by a given angle during a collision with an atomic nucleus. Cross section is typically denoted σ (sigma) and is expressed in units of area, more specific in barns. In a way, it can be thought of as the size of the object that the excitation must hit in order for the process to occur, but more exactly, it is a parameter of a stochastic process."
“Chris says: instead, think of yourself as getting 500 micromarriages each time . All you need to do is go to a thousand parties and you have a 50-50 chance of meeting the right person!”
I feel like the math here is a bit off. Surely you don’t just multiply the probability with the number of events to get the correct number, right?
I figured it out, apparently you can use the 1-(1-p)^n formula, n being the number of parties, and p the probability of finding a wife. The result will be the probability of finding a wife if you attend n parties.
if you attend 1000 parties and get 500 micromarriages each time, you would have a 39.3545% chance of finding the right person, while to get 50% chance you should attend roughly 1386 parties, which is even more discouraging.
Interestingly with that formula, removing the first "1-" if you find the limit as n goes to infinity and p goes to 0 you will get 1/e. And that's my story of independently discovering e.
My wife and I received this toast when we got married, and it really stuck with me: Welcome to the first of many marriages! May they all be with the same person. :-)
Congratulations! Marriage is about the shared storied, and you are well on the way to a long and successful relationship. Wishing you and your significant other a lifetime of bliss.
Congrats! I've done it twice, once badly and once (apparently/so far/knock on wood) better. Yes it is a contract but....no it's not "like any other". It is in my own experience its own unique category for good and/or ill.
(And even while failing at it I never stopped wanting to learn and get better and try again. Very glad that I did.)
This sounds as a very bad advice without context provided. Taken at a face value it's a recipe for getting into abusive/codependent relationship.
The main problem with being victim of abuse, as I understand it, isn't that you hate your partner even when they are just eating crackers. It's that you love them even when they beat you bloody. And then you forgive them, sacrificing your values not to be treated horribly for the sake of your joint future.
It only works right when both partners are cooperating, optimizing their joint utility function, sacrificing only when its optimal for the well-being of them both and knowing that their partner will do the same. And it is complicated. It requires lots of well deserved trust, lots of knowledge of each other and great abilities to communicate and update on evidence.
And that's why many people are not eager to do it. They are reasonably cautious and it has nothing to do with stupidity.
Congratulations! I have long used a game theory - restricting options - type description of marriage but I'm stealing yours now because it is better. Also: I like your suit, the purples go well together (I'm on a compliment men about their garments kick, it happens too infrequently and is an easy way to make people happier).
I'm one of those rare breeds that found success on Tinder. It's only been about 6 months with my current partner, but I still think about these questions of commitment a lot. The only metric I've ever found to be successful is the same one I used for deciding my job and college major - on my worst days ever, am I still going to pick this (person/job/field/etc)?
It's easy to choose in a euphoric happy mood or even your default. But is it still the decision you make when you wake up late for work, your coffee was wrong, your boss gave you extra projects, and some asshole cut you off in traffic on the way home?
If the answer is yes, chances are you're on the right path.
I never realized I wanted to know what a Scott Alexander article on marriage would look like until I saw it. So: thank you for taking time out of the rest of your life to share that with us. Wow. Enjoy the rest. I can't wait to see what it will be like, either.
Obligatory nerdpick re "exactly one million micromarriages later":
I think the number of micromarriages after which your probability of being married is 1/2, is that X for which (1 - 1/10^6)^X = 0.5. In LISP, that's (/ (log .5) (log (- 1 (/ 1 (expt 10 6))))) = 693146.9.
(That's 1 million times the natural log of 2. The simplification of the formula is left as an exercise to the reader.)
Your probability of being married at least once after 1 million micromarriages is
To estimate your own personal chances of getting married using standardized micromarriage values for particular social events, you must merely assume that all people are identical, and that your perceived desirabilities at different social events aren't correlated. If these conditions aren't met, you may wish to replace your native social responses with ones generated by GPT trained on a sufficiently large corpus of observed social behavior.
Scott, are all 100k readers of this blog invited to the wedding? :D Congratulations!
I love the idea of micromarriages. I would also point out that doing things like working out hard at the gym and losing weight down to 10-12% bodyfat will do wonders to improve one's rate of success. So if you had 500 micromarriage points at 20% bodyfat, you'll probably have 2000 micromarriage points at 12% bodyfat. Being attractive works :-)
I have used the advice of 'maximize the amount of low-probability chances' with dating as well (it does seem in a way like just a nerdy extrapolation of 'go outside and do things', but works online too!), with the other side I sometimes tell people being a Shelling point-like approach: 'imagine the types of places you might, by chance, encounter your ideal partner, and go to those places, whether it is a loud bar, an introverted book club, a role-playing video game, Twitter responses to an obscure poll, a niche discord server, or something even weirder'.
Having absurdly strong positive trapped priors with respect to another person sounds a lot like a nerdy definition of love to me, and in my opinion makes it worth pursuing all the more.
Congratulations and wish you both a lovely life together.
On staying married, I think there needs to be a commitment to the commitment. I think Westerners cut themselves too much slack on this one.
My advice to people trying to get married is to think about the type of person you like, and put yourself in places where they are likely to hang out. At some point, if you meet someone and connect, make a commitment without over-thinking it. :) What is over-thinking...? You'll know.
Re-met my wife in a role-playing one shot of blades in the dark I arranged to get over a breakup. We knew each other before, but she had a boyfriend at the time and it wasn't meant to be. Until it was.
What I'm trying to say - life is hilariously weird. Mazal Tov :)
For anyone looking to maximize their micro-marriages, I highly recommend some kind of dance class. Our salsa rueda class ended up pairing off half of the people who stuck with it, including me. It was a 500k micromarriage event!
I appreciate the micromarriages approach for the implicit message that if something didn't work, even many times, it doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with you that you need to change.
About Mt. Everest, for me agreeing to a setup is one. I've been set up far fewer than 30 times, and it resulted in my 2nd longest relationship and in my 1st longest: marriage + child. So definitely more than 30,000 micromarriages each.
Again, for me, OkCupid & tinder resulted in many dates and even a few cute people, but 0 serious relationships.
About the birth of a star, I don't think I know long relationships like that. I wonder why the negative spiral is so much more common...
I meant something elementary, like this. Your roommate/sibling/coworker says "I have a friend I want to set you up with. Will you go on a date with them?" And you say yes and go on the date.
It's not something you can easily initiate (maybe ask for a setup? Haven't tried this), but you can make sure you don't turn it down.
All my life, I have been set up exactly *once* and it went nowhere. The "partnership market" and the "job market" share a lot of disconcerting similarities. If years go by and you are perceived by friends and acquaintances as "a perpetual loner", the chances of them "recommending you to someone" go exponentially down as you enter a negative feedback loop.
Same applies to being invited to parties. "A thousand parties"? Come on Scott, in a good year I'd maybe invited to 0.3 parties. Sheesh.
If I had kids, I'd give them the following rather cynical advice:
"Realize that prospective partners are a scarce and unequally distributed resource. To access it you'll need to go to great lengths, do things you find dumb, and suck up to the gatekeepers"
Anyhow, congrats to Scott on getting married and we look forward to a superbly, hyper-rationally optimized relationship upon which any number of scientific publications will certainly build!
(...but there's a slight math error in the micromarriage calculations. Assuming that each marriage attempt is independent, marriage probabilities multiply together, not add together. 1,000 500 µMar events does not add up to 50% probability of marriage. Trivial proof: 2,000 500 µMar events does not add up to a 100% probability of marriage, and 3,000 500 µMar events does not add up to a 150% probability of marriage. The correct formula is P(Marriage) = 1 - (1,000,000 - µMar/event)^(# events), which comes out to about 40% for a thousand 500 µMar events.
The additive approximation is pretty damned close for small numbers of events with low probabilities, so for the purpose of adding together, say, ten parties worth of potential marriages it makes sense to just add together micromarriages. But there's a philosophical difference in that there's no threshold of events you can accrue that will guarantee marriage (except marriage itself, which I guess is a 1 megamicromarriage event).)
Except that we should certainly NOT assume that each marriage attempt is independent. Say you regularly attend parties, but the other attendees are 95% the same at those parties. If your problem is meeting the right person, then the first party will give you 100% of your probability, while subsequent attendances will drop precipitously. OTOH, maybe the problem is that you need multiple encounters to make the association stick. In that case, your probability compounds each time you attend the same party, potentially in a geometric way.
In my experience, romance hits you like a sanding block on the subway. Impossible to predict in advance that it was going to hit you. Even when it's someone you already knew. Best policy is to keep your exposure up, but not worry too hard about it. You can't try harder to get in the way of random objects striking you on the head, but you can get frustrated that more random objects don't hit you if you're watching for them all day. Also, people are much more interested in people who are going somewhere with their life. You can't steer a parked car, in other words.
If the quantification game keeps people motivated, that's great. But I wouldn't consider it meaningful, since it relies on a lot of assumptions about the underlying relationships between events that are almost certainly unknowable.
I've heard another model for marriage, which is just that people marry whoever they happen to be dating when they get to the age where they decide they're ready for marriage. So to get married, you just need to have a steady string of partners, and wait.
The main danger in this model is that you have a too-far-from-ideal person in the partner slot when the music stops, so you need to make sure you have reasonably high standards for whom you date, but not so high that you've got nobody in that slot.
This model is even less romantic than the micromarriage model, but there's some truth to it too.
There's an implicit model of marriage that sees it like drawing a circle around two people who are naturally highly compatible, plus some social contract stuff thrown into the mix. Your job is to find a compatible person prior to drawing up the social contract. Failed relationships are poor pairings where a social contract was drawn up in error.
I think that's a very bad model.
Although I think there is a compatibility threshold that needs to be met, in my experience any relationship is defined more by the work you put into it (plus reciprocal work) than it is by initial conditions. This is why many couples report their relationship getting better as they mature, despite physical attraction having a reputation as aging like lunch meat. A relationship is a structure you build together. It's an entity in itself - or it will be at some point. At first, maybe it's just a nominal pairing of two people who like to be together. Eventually, it is its own edifice; a kind of built-up social capital with high subjective value.
I think all relationships are like this in a certain way, not just marriage. I recently went to my 20 year HS reunion. I recognized a bunch of people with whom I immediately realized I have no residual relationship anymore. It was like starting from scratch, even for people I used to spend time with every day. Our rapport reset had nothing to do with compatibility. It's just that the relationship itself had atrophied.
I'd also add to this - borrowing from catastrophe risk calculations in future discounting, where the longer you/a civilisation survives, greater the chance that you are in a "low background risks" environment - the more things you do that do not lead to a latching, you should update probabilities of you being fundamentally unlikeable/dateable/marriageable
ps. speaking of Kabbalistic significances, Maps' 'Love Will Come' was paused on my desktop spotify(I had started listening it before the article was posted) when I started reading this post. One of the first things I did when I sat at my computer today is to start reading ACX, and this song was paused from last night.
I guess there are "Bayesian" and Kabbalistic takeaways from my comment, in opposite directions
A marvelous post! After 42 years with the same woman, I like to think that I fit your metaphor of that giant blue star, but it ain't all rolling downhill to mix the similes
Congratulations! I see that a lot of commenters are themselves in happy marriages, but also some looking for advice on making the right choice:
I've heard this story relayed to me in China by an American who heard it in Egypt from the Orthodox Greek priest. In Orthodox Christianity you cannot get a divorce, and while priests are supposed to always conduct interviews, this seldom stops a marriage. This young Greek priest however took his role seriously, and asked five questions, and the partners, separately, had to have matching or positive answers. He claims, and my experience matches, that whenever a divorce happens, it's one of those five segments, so that's what to check:
1) Sexual preferences and attraction (do you find each other attractive)
2) Religion and Values (matching belief systems)
3) How to earn/spend money (work life balance, thriftiness or opulence)
4) How many children to have, when, and how to raise them
5) Where to live (city or countryside, which country, apartment or house...)
I'd add to this the prerequisite of respecting and being honest to each other, but this list covers everything. Within the first month of my last relationship I checked for all five, built a culture of honesty and respect with her, and we've been happily married ever since :)
My best friend married a Christian, and their pastor did something along these lines. I think it was an online questionnaire that they took separately, and they were scored on ~these five areas. In the ceremony, he said they got perfect compatibility scores on everything... except religion, where they were complete opposites. But I don't think religion is going to be an issue; they've already been together for eleven years.
Anyway this seems like a great practice, and I wish it was more readily available for non-Christians! I'd never even heard of it until my friend's wedding.
I wish your friend all the best, but I'd find it hard to be with someone of different religion, and have seen many happy relationships fail there. If you believe in a soul you might, just a bit less, swim to save our drowning child, knowing there's an afterlife for it. I exaggerate, but I'd be angry at tithe paid, or even time spent aiding a church, because I'm an atheist. So I'd still keep this practice aiming for 5/5
"If you believe in a soul you might, just a bit less, swim to save our drowning child, knowing there's an afterlife for it."
Maybe if you believe in a religion that has an afterlife but no commandment to self-sacrificial virtue. This would not be the case in, e.g., Christianity, a sincere believer would sincerely believe that there is an afterlife, but also sincerely believe John 15:12-13: 'This is my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.'
That said, you are right about being unequally yoked. For exactly the same reasons you cite, it wouldn't be fair to either party and should be avoided.
Dedicated atheism to the point that you do not respect tithing or time spent doing work in the religion or proselytizing is definitionally excluded, and that’s what the commenter specified.
Congratulations! Marriage is fantastic. Once you have that commitment layer you can build something that transcends what seemed possible in any previous relationship.
"For some reason neither Ozy nor I ever wondered about the opposite phenomenon. Is it possible to like someone so much that the positive emotion builds on itself, grows stronger and stronger with every interaction, until it’s one of those blue supergiant stars in the galactic core?"
Absolutely yes, and it's great. If you truly trust your spouse (and I mean trust their intentions with you, not just that they aren't lying or cheating), then you see evidence for that trust grow all over the place. Sometimes it's a false positive, but that just becomes something you can both laugh about later, when you do talk about that nice gesture they made and it turns out they were doing something completely different.
Big congratulations! Your commentary on Siren-infested waters is hilarious. Arguably it's a big event, and without the foresight to tie yourself to a mast, it can destroy a relationship. It got me thinking about John Gottman's work.
Over decades of research, Gottman’s top indicator of successful relationships is what he calls bids. Bids are the units of connection and how we show up in our relationships daily. (They're not Siren scale events.) Bids can be sexual, funny, serious. They can be in the form of a question (“how did your presentation go?”) or physical (a loving squeeze), or an expression (a long audible sigh after reading something stressful). The classic example is if they get excited about seeing a cool bird do you try to see the bird yourself? Do you ask more questions about the bird? Or do you say, “That’s nice, hun.” and go back to your book or whatever you were doing before you were interrupted by your partner. We tend to think about betrayals as these big moments, but these micro-actions significantly impact how we connect in the long run.
May you two always care for the small moments and acknowledge each other's bids as much as the milestones.
Second, talking about Singaporean child tax credits on your 1st date, and then category formation in BPD and anomalously high suicide rates in the Inuit on your 2nd and 3rd dates... sigh! 😍 Oh, young looooooove! Again... sigh! 😍
I mean, I myself am too shy for naked parties (modulo proper COVID precautions, natch!) in general... let alone ones organized by rationalist luminaries like Aella who, moreover, have substantial general fame for being a super-successful "camgirl" pioneer and for writing voluminously and insightfully about high-end sex work of the contemporary online-mediated sort.
As such, lil' ol' shy me just used eHarmony.
I fondly remember that --- after eHarmony had matched me with a series 8 or 9 women over the course of about 18 months, leading to relationships of maybe 5 or 6 dates with 2 of the women, and then pretty much just moderately-fun-thanks-but-not-thanks introductory dates with the rest of them --- eHarmony matched me with the woman I married.
And with HER (again 😍 emoji are in order!), we talked on our first date about disability-adjusted life years and $/estimated-DALY-gained thresholds for WHO and other global public health interventions.
It was definitely true looooove. [See postscript for the added description honesty compels me to add.]
PROMISED COMPELLED-BY-HONESTY POSTCRIPT: Alas, it was the sort of true loooooove that --- with the requisite preface that I'm admittedly straining for the most amusing-while-still-vaguely-accurate pop culture analogy readily at hand that I think would be likely understood by a wide swathe of this audience --- was kinda like the true looooove shared by Natasha and Bruce in the MCU. Suffice it to say she was a downright goddess who had sublimated a highly traumatic upbringing into super-highly functioning heroism, and I was (arguably) a brilliant physicist who definitely had an anger management problem on which I was mightily-but-unsuccessfully trying to keep a consistent handle. In the end, like Bruce, I failed to get a handle on it in any remotely timely fashion. Thus, like Bruce, I tragically broke up our true loooooooove. (However, I hasten to add that, unlike Bruce, I never physically endangered her in the course of helping her as best I could with her heroics. Moreover, I did not potentially cause dozens of collateral deaths and certainly cause many billions of dollars in collateral property damage. 🤦)
> And with HER (again 😍 emoji are in order!), we talked on our first date about disability-adjusted life years and $/estimated-DALY-gained thresholds for WHO and other global public health interventions.
This is great, but I have a worry that somewhere out there are people rading these examples and thinking that they need to find someone who shares their intellectual obsessions, and that this is going to be a massive limitation for them.
I just want to reassure these people that it's okay if your first date, or any subsequent date, doesn't sound like an Astral Codex Ten open thread (whether odd or even numbered). Philosophically-inclined people can also find love with less philosophically-inclined, more grounded people.
If your partner isn't a rationalist, you might want to be sure to have friends who are. In a world where many don't understand the profound limits of standard epistemology, I'd go crazy if I couldn't talk about rationalist-type stuff with my partner.
Also, rationalists can be so sweet. While most humans have a sincere desire to be kind, a lack of self-awareness hampers the praxis. People who realize the flaws with their self-model have a better shot at manifesting their good intentions and correcting their assholery.
But there are plenty of kindness-manifesting non-rationalists too.
Plus, people are often wrong about their list of love-worthy partner qualifications. I've certainly made this mistake repeatedly. My first error was to pursue the most intelligent man I could find. After 4 years of a disastrous relationship with a brilliant, kind yet highly dysfunctional man, I learned that other partner traits might matter more than raw intelligence. Next, one of my other favorite personality traits rose to the top of the list - rebelliousness/iconoclasm, so I dated/married a gives-no-fucks man who has a loving heart buried under rage that burns like hellfire. 10 years later, I escaped that terrifying and abusive relationship. Then as fate would have it, I was saved from my own bad decision-making when my current partner chose me. Current partner (of 5+ years) is remarkably unambitious, socially unassertive and manifests his geekiness mostly in the direction of video games rather than other intellectual pursuits (suffice to say, traits/tendencies that initially placed him in the friend zone)... and he's the best thing that ever happened to me. He is kind, smart-as-fuck but not in a flashy way, honest, grounded, patient and sexy in a way I didn't initially see. I'm so grateful that he persisted past the friend zone and list of ostensibly important partner characteristics :-)
Thanks for sharing. As a man who definitely... *floridly*... was "brilliant, kind yet highly dysfunctional" for a decade (or two), I want to second your experience by addressing myself to any readers out there who might be worrying they too are similarly in this dicey category of "brilliant, kind, yet highly dysfunctional".
While yes, keep hope alive: the gates of repentance and recovery are always open... <taking the Lord's name in vain deleted> it can take a LONG time... and some of those times it takes a LONG time are pretty <expletive deleted>ing obviously predictable. Better said, try to the utmost despite the personal angst involved to be circumspect about how dysfunctional you're being and how much "work" you'll be able to do in the foreseeable future to get yourself out of your rut. While there is the whole "in sickness and in health" ideal of marriage vows and -- indeed --- of any really committed relationship generally, there's also simultaneously the ideal of "if you love somebody, set them free...". Thus, even if:
1) you've found yourself blessed with some partner who sincerely wants to help you recover/become-your-better-self/et cetera,
2) you yourself honestly want this help and are able to nontrivially "do the work", and last but not least
3) your partner is *in no way naive* about the emotional toll helping someone can take,
then I still say --- indeed, I'm doubly emphatic in saying --- it's necessary to introspect and then discuss with your partner whether you're truly up for receiving the blessing they're lovingly offering you at this stage of your life.
Again, goodnight and good luck, y'all. For all those finding it a struggle, let me affirm: yes, it's a struggle, but in the end it can be a beautiful struggle.
P.S. If anyone can tell me who specifically I'm paraphrasing with that affirmation about it being a struggle, but it can be a beautiful struggle, I'd be most grateful. I have this amorphous memory that it came up in some early 2010s NPR interview with the singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle (son of singer-songwriter Steve Earle) about he (and his dad's) battles with addiction. But (1) I have yet to find a segment explicitly with the "beautiful struggle" language and either of the Earles, and (2) I can't clearly remember whether the notion came up clearly as a quote of someone else.
P.P.S. I'm well aware that Justin Townes Earle in the end tragically died of an accidental overdose of cocaine laced with fentanyl. The "can" and "struggle" are key words, alas, in the phrase "... but it can be a beautiful struggle." 😔
Re: dysfunctional - I myself 'identify' as pretty damn dysfunctional, having spent most of my life like a leaf in the wind (in reference to Scott's description of BPD - https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/16/borderline/), and thus I am the recipient of my partner's blessing (patience).
The dysfunctional man I referenced is usual, though can't be singular (could he?). He was a hoarder of inoperable vehicles and other large items; always had grand plans about what he was going to construct from parting out such things, yet tragically little follow-through; had a seeming desire to live in poverty, or at least his decisions always seemed to lead there (despite having highly valuable infosec skills); would periodically respond to other men with animalistic aggression (e.g. pointing a shotgun at someone's face after a verbal altercation). At the same time, he never lifted a finger against me, loves animals and has unique relationships with them (training cats to ride on his shoulder as he walks around town), and had a strong desire to fix the world's problems (he was obsessed with sustainability before it was a popular idea). Beautiful soul.
After more than a decade I'm finally over my irritation with him for steering me into a very difficult life for those years (which included living in a camping tent during a <0°F winter, literally being hungry, and consistently having people mad at us for overstaying our welcome and/or leaving inoperable vehicles on their land), and now I just think of him with affection and sadness. His life has been so hard, mostly because of his own actions. But he did not *choose* to be dysfunctional. I wonder if there is anything I could have done to help him escape his own vortex.
May all beings escape their self-sabotaging dysfunctions and thus minimize their suffering!
Second, thanks for sharing again more of your life experience. I say that in particular since one of the first posts on ye olde Slate Star Codex to really make an impact on my po' po' lil' brain was:
which was about all the hidden challenges and downright ordeals of hair-raising suffering that seem freakin' secretly *omnipresent* if you're in you're a doctor in certain subfields of medicine (most obviously, psychiatry or emergency medicine) or --- I might add --- if you're anyone who's partaken in recovery groups or found yourself living on "the wrong side of the tracks" at any point in one's life.
So, after reading your comment, I then naturally thought (well, "naturally" for me, at least), "Hmmm... I wonder how many people are within, say, 2 degrees of separation of me who have similar extended stretches of 'highly out-of-the-ordinary housing'?" (I use the phrase "highly-out-of-the-ordinary-housing" since I'm not sure you'd call the situation you shared homelessness.) Next, I clicked back to read that old "How bad are things?" SSC post hoping it'd save me from having to dive down a Google Scholar rabbit hole trying to find methodologically solid and up-to-date lifetime prevalence statistics for "homelessness", preferably in a broadly defined sense that would capture your situation (which, again I'm not sure you consider "homelessness").
So, after maybe 10 minutes of having multiple tabs open, including papers covering methodological challenges in surveying homelessness and cross-national comparisons (and methodological challenges in comparing cross-national surveys of homelessness... oh my!), I remembered "Oh right, I'm trying to rein in my hyperfocusing neuroses and not give into the ever present temptations of the the internet! I have to go to bed, and thus I need to draw this comment to a close sooner rather than later." 🙄
Thus, I decided to content my curiosity tonight with the following solitary, authoritative-seeming-yet-nicely-non-paywalled reference. Though I only skimmed it, and though I'm a physicist not a public health physician, I nonetheless commend it to y'all:
Jack Tsai [Yale University School of Medicine]. "Lifetime and 1-year prevalence of homelessness in the US population: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions-III", _Journal of Public Health_, Volume 40, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 65–74, https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdx034
TL;DR -- 4.2% is the estimated prevalence among adults as of 2017 in the USA answering affirmatively the following question: "Since you were 15, did you have a time that lasted at least 1 month when you had no regular place to live-like living on the street or in a car?"
In closing, wow... that was perhaps an overly long roundabout way to come back to "hey, thanks for sharing your experiences again"... but what are the comment threads of ACT for if not that trio of important thingies:
1) Internet-enabled penpalling with like-minded individuals,
2) Encountering new facts and ideas off the beaten path,
3) Being enmeshed in one constant therapeutic exercise in not letting oneself get lost down internet rabbit holes?! 😉
Right you are, Melvin. Indeed, before I digressed into schtick with the whole Natasha and Bruce MCU analogy to my relationship and sorta lost my train of thought, I was thinking I should include my comment some general encouraging advice like yours... after all, Scott's post is entitled "There's a Time for Everyone".
So seconding that theme as well as your point, Melvin:
1) While we still dating, this Saturday Night Live parody of eHarmony aired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6YUm2For-8. We definitely laughed at it, and many of our friends and family thought it applied to us. That said, while we definitely had a lot of interests, attitudes, and quirks that overlapped, we also had many that didn't. And, indeed, I do think people in general should be easy-going about having interests, attitudes, and quirks that don't overlap... and that probably goes double or triple for rationalist and rationalist-adjacent people who might be a little, ahem, *extreme* compared to the norm in their particular personal interests.
2) While I similarly digressed into schtick about being too shy to go to a whacky Aella-hosted naked-but-with-COVID-precautions party even if I were in that niche of the Bay Area rationalist scene, I want to emphasize to any readers that are thinking reading Scott's (or, to a much lesser extent, my) story
"Oh, that's all well and good for you that you eventually found true looooove, but I'm *PAINFULLY SOCIALLY ANXIOUS* and can't imagine even going through the ordeal of multiple dates with one potential partner to assess their potential, let alone all this accumulation of "micromarriages" with all sorts of strangers to accumulate eventually an adequate number of potential partners that I find true loooooove!"
Well, I was PAINFULLY SOCIALLY ANXIOUS. And it was definitely painful over like a 2 year period to not be utterly driven mad by the anxiety surrounding dating, but it was worth it.
3) True loooove can end in divorce. And even if you're a monogamous person like myself who can't really imagine personally adopting polyamory to cope with the fact even your true looooove sometimes can't meet all your needs (and --- hopefully needless to say --- not just romantic or sexual, but also emotional and intellectual), and even though breakups are painful... it's worth it.
4) That said, try NOT to have true loooove end in divorce. I once heard the comedian Marc Maron say something like, "There came a point in every one of my marriages that ended in a divorce where I thought, 'Yeah, I know she really needs me to do this thing, but <expletive deleted>, I know I'm not going to do that thing.' " Now, having that thought does NOT need to be followed immediately by the thought "Yup, time to call the divorce lawyer." But, with the painful wisdom of <expletive deleted>ing up true loooooove, I strongly encourage any of y'all having that thought to treat it with the utmost priority until you find a mutually agreeable compromise with your partner or you both realize that it's time to part amicably.
Not sure that was inspirational or useful to anyone but me, but I thought I should write it all. Goodnight and good luck.
I’d like to leave it at that, but can’t let this pass without comment: “COVID is 2,500 micromorts per infection”.
Surely this is a meaningless figure. Your personal COVID infection micromorts depend primarily on your age, then on pre-existing conditions & vaccine status, then on sex & obesity (or maybe race and smoking status). Whatever the exact balance and ordering, risk varies enormously from person to person. It’s unhelpful to assign one figure for all.
All figures are meaningless - the Mt. Everest one clearly depends how experienced a mountaineer you are, how many supplies you bring, etc. It's all abstraction.
When my wife and I got married, we had a thing where we got all our older married guests offer a piece of marriage advice. While I won’t be so presumptuous as to offer my own attempts at wisdom, I thought I might pass along the ones that have stayed with me the most in the 14 years since then.
From my great grandmother: “Say yes to everything!”
From an aunt with 9 children: “Sleep while you can.”
+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.
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!
That is very cool. Good luck!
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.
If you construct your online profile well, internet dating probably gives you the most micro marriages possible. Congrats!
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!
Congratulations.
Congratulations Scott! Been following you since the LJ days, under alternating pseudonyms, so feel like I know you in am odd parasocial way. So happy that you are happy
Many happy returns :)
First, congrats!
Second ...
> Is it possible to like someone so much that the positive emotion builds on itself, grows stronger and stronger with every interaction, until it’s one of those blue supergiant stars in the galactic core?
As someone who's been married nearly 21 years, I'd say yes, this is definitely possible. My wife and I get along very, very well. We fight, of course, but mostly we just enjoy each other's company. I definitely find some of her very normal behaviors very adorable, and I'm sure no other person would have the same reaction to these behaviors of hers.
I feel pretty lucky to have found _a_ right person to get married to (neither of believe in soulmates).
I very much agree with Dave. I also don't believe in soulmates, but after 17 years with my wife, I definitely feel very strongly about growing together. It was the thing I felt most was missing in this otherwise very cheery post: growth not like stars but like plants, growth as an organic process. Contracts and precommitment not as mechanisms but as trellises. More inosculating and and pollarding than delimiting and delineating. The more you think of you the couple as one entity and interact with the world as if that were true, the stronger your relationship becomes.
But I do think some trellis work is good early on. When you're getting started especially, meet each other 2/3 of the way, not 1/2 the way. If you commit to only 1/2 the way and either one of you underestimates the distance between your positions even a little, you'll never meet in the middle at all. Also, when you personally make a mistake, it's your mistake, but if she does, it's our mistake. If she has a good idea, make sure she gets the hat tip/citation, but when you do, be less stressed about credit. Gestures of positive credit-sharing like that bring you closer.
Agree with this. Things I found irksome in my husband month 1 of the marriage are adorable to me by now (year 7) because they're part of the parcel of who he is.
Congrats!
Hey congratulations!
Congratulations! I don't know what the kabalistic symbolism for building a house together would be, but the straightforward symbolism is very straightforward.
Huge congratulations to you both. That’s wonderful news.
Good luck! Am approaching 30 years, and while it is not always easy, it is definitely worth it.
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
"Prudence while fully exposed to supernatural unearthly beauty."
This was beautiful.
I was very happy to read the announcement. Congratulations to you both!
Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! So excited for you!
Mozel Tov!
God grant you many years!
Micromairrage indeed. I spent 3 years actively messaging and dating on a dating site before I found my spouse. (About 10 hours a week for 150 weeks)
Wow congrats!
Mazel tov!!!!
Okay, seriously, what kind of person announces his marriage and then makes most of the announcement about soul-sucking messes and the exigencies of tying oneself to the mast in order to stay married? Why is it a good idea to explain all of that *in your wedding announcement*? We are all delighted if you're delighted. Congratulations. Let me know if you need a romance coach. Sounds like you need one.
underrated point.
:)
I don't know about 'good idea', but it's definitely very Scott, speaking as a near decade-long reader of his many blogs.
The "I love you" that comes late, after great deliberation, carries more weight than the "I love you" that blows in and out again with every stray gust of wind.
If you're the sort of person who values such weight, such gravity, then there is great romance in somebody marrying you, while carrying great suspicion and reservation about marriage itself.
This is precisely correct. It shows an adult and clear eyed perspective on the state of marriage - 'can be terrible, but hey look, *with you*, it has the potential to be really, really great as well'.
What, you don't think marriage involves ropes and bondage? (insert Groucho Marx eyebrow waggle here).
Look, marriage is great but it's also tough. There are temptations, there are things that wear away at it, there are pitfalls. So you have to tie yourself to the mast and go "No, I have something else to do that is more important to me than getting eaten by sirens" in order to stick it out, but then if you do, you get to slaughter importunate suitors and pet your old dog just before it dies.
Then you and your equally clever and wise wife will test one another with words, then weep in each other's arms, and then go to rest in the famous marriage-bed once more in peace and happiness.
That note about "watching a girl set set ablaze" really came out of left field.
The heartbreaking thing is he can't pet his dog, to avoid being found out, and the dog then dies thinking he was ignored.
Are you married? I had come under the impression that you weren't.
I am not, but my parents were 😁 I am also acquainted with at least several married people!
I'm not one bit suited for marriage, nor marriage for me, but that is also how I know it's hard work as well as joy, like most human things.
We wrote our own vows and of course showed them to the other beforehand. She was very concerned that mine said things like, "I can't promise I will always love you but I will always try." It didn't sound at all romantic. I told her why I wanted to say it; she agreed to leave it in; and forty years later, I sometimes feel like we're crazy in love.
What kind of person criticizes the writing of someone's marriage announcement on the day it's made? I'd say it's characteristic of how Scott thinks; presumably his spouse is someone who's happy with that way of thinking. It's nobody else's business whether it looks romantic enough. (Though I find Odysseus and the sirens an appealing analogy, and as Scott says better to put the rumination here than in the wedding itself.)
>>Why is it a good idea to explain all of that *in your wedding announcement*? <<
Funny thing: it seemed perfectly natural to me.
Perhaps this is a clue:
>>so far there’s no standardized Rationalist liturgy. <<
Two rationalists decide to marry their fortunes together. Should we be surprised that at least one of them is fascinated by the logic of the process (and confident that his lengthy explication will not offend the other)?
Some people find protracted discussion of the pro and cons of marriage, the mechanics of commitment and the rationality of loving the person you love romantic.
It's good precisely because anyone who has ever been married understands that Scott knows exactly what he's getting into - I've officiated several of my friends' weddings and the urge to "caution" as well as "taking care" is an important part of the marital obligation. Any major endeavor should be entered not only with giddy optimism but also "in fear and trembling" (to steal from Kierkegaard) for it to have the best chance of success.
Almost every wedding I've been to (especially the "mature" ones where the betrothed were both over 30) included comments and metaphors to that effect in the proceedings or vows. Announcing that you want to physically bind yourself to your marriage in order to help you stay in it is good proof that you're dedicated. It's not distasteful or unromantic. Some weddings even include a ritual of tying bride and groom's hands together with phsyical rope! If you're making a committment, why not make it clear that you're doing everything possible to keep yourself to your committment?
Congratulations to the two of you!
You know, I was going to make a joke about airline manufacturing contracts not being the most romantic metaphor, but then you hit me with that "the feeling of love is like the siren's song" analogy and I nearly swooned.
Mazal Tov, Scott!
So happy for the both of you!
Congratulations!
One of my favorite descriptions of marriage came from Ira Glass on This American Life. He was talking with someone who absolutely refused to ever consider getting married, because he was terrified of being stuck or losing freedoms. Ira said that to him, the permanence of marriage was a feature, not a bug. Having someone that you *know* will always be with you is a tremendous comfort. No matter what may come, you won't have to face it alone; you're inescapably bound to this other person.
Of course a year or two later he ended up getting divorced, but I still find his vision to be very comforting.
I've always been fascinated by the shocked and dismayed description of marriage by Philip Larkin (who was constitutionally allergic to the idea of marriage): "He married a woman to stop her getting away / Now she's there all day." I'm fascinated by it because it is so utterly alien to the way I think, or you think, or Ira Glass thinks.
Yeah I've never had any ability to understand some folks terror at the idea of marriage. Especially since many of them don't appear to be using any of the freedoms they would lose by entering into a marriage in the first place!
Well, in Philip Larkin's case, the freedom he would have lost by getting married was the freedom to string two (or more!) girlfriends along simultaneously literally for decades, each hoping that he'd marry her. Larkin was a great poet but not a very admirable person.
I'm curious, how does being married work with polyamory? You mentioned you were dating a biosecurity grad student, is that your wife or a different person?
(It's fine if you don't want to discuss this publicly but I was just curious.)
My wife and I are both poly and we have an open relationship. The biosecurity grad student is a different person (although my wife helped put on a biosecurity conference, so I guess I have a type).
I hope this correctly comes off as baffled rather than judgey, but I have trouble understanding exactly what this means. How will your life be different going forward?
(To validate my lack of judginess, I will say that my wife and I lived together monogamously for a decade and a half before we married, and more than one friend allowed as how they had thought we were *already* married. And in some ways it’s hard for me to explain what’s different now, after two decades of marriage. But I’m really happy we did it.)
In any case, like everyone else here, I offer congratulations and shared happiness.
The most common arrangements are 1) emotional monogamy (no getting intimate with other people, no taking them out on dates etc., just having friends, some of whom are with benefits) and 2) full-fledged polyamory (you have primary, secondary, tertiary partners and there are arrangements as to what is permitted with whom).
(Well, the most common type of nonmonogamy is promising monogamy and cheating. But that’s not quite relevant.)
Consider the part of the post about marriage being a contract, a commitment. If you're poly and you're married, you've made that "'til death do us part" commitment to probably just one person, even if you have multiple partners.
The main way our life is different is that we'll be trying for children.
Otherwise, like you say, since we've already tested out living together and spending most of our time / emotional energy with each other, we jumped the gun a bit and there won't be too much difference.
> we'll be trying for children
Suddenly apparent why the recent long musings about primary school and climate change not affecting one's decision to have kids...
Ooh, I hope you teach them to blog!
This also might be a good time to update the "biodeterminist's guide to parenting."
Ooh, yes, that thing is going on a decade old now! http://doc.dreev.es/biodet
Or they could try Laszlo Polgar "must be interested in n=1 developmental-psych experiments"
It would be a relief to know that Scott has a rightful heir so I don't have to spend a decade or two reading only the backlog
Good for you! Poly is one of the few things that are both very rational and very exciting (if done right). Good luck with your next million micromarriages! :)
Well, congratulations.
Micromarriages, huh. I spent ten years folk-dancing, which is a great way to meet people of the opposite sex, before I met her who would become my wife. If I'd thought of it as micromarriages, I would probably have given up. I was there because I liked the dancing. Dating someone I'd met there, which didn't happen until after I accidentally ran into her somewhere else, was not on my radar, thank goodness.
I, in contrast, was at folk dancing precisely for the micromarriages, having been advised by a colleague's wife that it was a good place to meet girls.
It was.
If I'd been there to "meet girls" instead of to dance, several undesirable things would have followed: 1) I would have gotten frustrated as ten years passed without any result; 2) I would have enjoyed the dancing less as my attention focused on the futile process; 3) I would have been less popular as my ulterior motive would have been detected. (I am not a master of subtlety.) Your mileage may vary, but that would have been mine.
or maybe interest in people is not "ulterior" and would have led to success sooner
"interest in people" is not the same thing as the desire "to meet girls," and the latter is what David Friedma said he was out for.
ok you're implying there is a relevant difference there, but you don't say what it is. meeting potential partners is one of the main functions of social events. perhaps particularly dancing. it is not ulterior (unless you don't even like dancing, and are just pretending to, and perhaps David's post sounds a bit like that)
I don't much like dancing but I wasn't pretending to like it, I was doing my best to participate. As my wife puts it, from her observation, when they did a simple dance I followed, a little off the beat, and when they did a complicated dance I followed, a little off the beat."
I had done a good deal of unenthusaistic dance in the SCA, dance being one of my first wife's interests. It is also one of my second wife's interests. One of the ways in which she was better suited to the role was that she figured out early on that I wasn't a dancer and made no attempt to get me to participate. Now when the local group does a dance ball, with my wife providing music and our daughter dancing and teaching, I am in the kitchen of the building producing period apple fritters for people.
Medieval cooking is one of my interests.
>Your mileage may vary, but that would have been mine.
I eventually gave up folk dancing, partly because I kept falling in love with persons I hardly knew and who had given me no indication that they were pleased!
I agree that dancing is a great way to "meet girls" - it worked very well for me. I also agree with Kalimac that it's better to have that be a side effect, but it works so well that David's approach also worked for him. Doesn't have to be folk dancing, could be any type of dancing.
Stereotype alert - notice it's all men seeking women.
Suggestion for David Friedma(n) - try deleting your substack account and creating a new one, maybe you can get back your missing letter.
It was easier than that. Scott was distracted by his bride, so I snuck in and stole it back.
folk-dancing, huh? Wilde should have tried it at least once...
I think relationship and dating advice is an epistemic wasteland. I've interviewed "successful" couples, and they don't even really know how they ended up there. But, there are idea clusters in the space, and one of them is that "living your best life" is an optimal strategy. You're right, the micro-marriage mindset would probably backfire or at best be exhausting, but directionally I think Scott's post is a roundabout re-iteration of, "live your best life, good things will happen." The micro-marriage thing is probably retroactive modeling of how it all panned out.
Eh, there are a lot of folks who's default "best life" involves meeting approximately no new people ever - I like the friends I have and find meeting new people exhausting. Dating needs to be a conscious strategy for people like that, and "micro-marriages" is a useful concept (though I'm not sold on the word).
Yes, I should have clarified that while I've noticed a cluster around the "live your best life" strategy, I myself am questioning whether that's always right for everyone.
To your point, there's also the saying, "love discriminates against the shy," which is a slam-dunk mechanically, no RCT required. Also related: a frequently upvoted response on Ask Metafilter about finding someone is "drink more."
At the end of the day, it's a numbers game, all the way down, I guess.
Well, just interviewing random couples would be as usual as interviewing a dozen of people who were ill and then cured and try to build a whole human biology and medicine theory from that. The field is way too vast for such approach to be useful. Some things - like "if you don't meet any new people then you'd have hard time meeting your future marriage partner" is on the level "if you're going to put your foot in the fire, it's probably gonna hurt" - but moving from such obvious stuff to deeper insights may require something more.
Congratulations!
Congratulations! You got married in the same week as a friend from another internet sphere -- good signs all around. Wishing you and your wife joy and wonders.
Congratulations!!
Congratulations!
Also because I am totally that guy and this is totally the only community where nobody will look at me oddly for this:
"All you need to do is go to a thousand parties and you have a 50-50 chance of meeting the right person! Maybe that number would sound more encouraging if it was lower"
(1999/2000)^1000 =~0.606
So at 500 micromarriages per party you'd need to attend 1386 before you passed the 50% point.
At 4500 parties there's still a 10% chance of no marriage.
At 9125 parties there's still more than 1% chance of no marriage.
So assuming a flat 500 micromarriages per party, if you start with 100 people who want to find a partner and they party nightly, 365 nights per year from age 18 through to age 43 there's still going to be like one guy who's just like "I'm so tired of partying, so very tired."
https://i.redd.it/dvgc4l7nc7841.jpg
I was going to do this calculation to check, but you not only beat me to it, you did the natural follow-up calculation too. Nice!
"Also because I am totally that guy and this is totally the only community where nobody will look at me oddly for this"
Unfortunately, this is also totally the sort of community that will look at you oddly just for suggesting none of them will.
(looks at you oddly)
But then, in that sense, perhaps you (and I) really are at home after all.
Non-additivity of micromarriages (and micromorts, for that matter) works out with the likely fact that micromarriages for a given instance of an activity is probably an increasing (likely sublinearly, but still) function relative to your cumulative total of micromarriages: you learn more about what seems to work, you learn more about yourself (likely including, to be clear, what prior must-haves aren't so important), and your experiences (or your presentation thereof...) tend to make yourself more appealing.
Yep: With each coin flip, you have a 1/2 chance of a head, but flipping it twice doesn't ensure that a head will turn up.
Still... hearty congratulations to you and your bride, Scott. May you have many happy decades ahead together!
Thanks, you really made me laugh, out loud!
This is really heart-warming and I've very happy for you.
I'm slowly realising that if I want to ever end up in a relationship I'm going to have to actually do something rather than just waiting for it to happen, and the micro-marriages framing seems like a useful motivational thing.
Conversely, it also serves as advice not to scuba dive.
Great reminder.
I think it's worth it, at least the first few times if you're young without pre existing conditions.
Online dating, if you find the right platform, does actually work well. My big piece of advice is that the various different sites and apps have radically different userbases, so you are better served by trying a dozen looking for one where you get lots of good matches rather than stubbornly sticking with one that doesn't work. (It took me 2 wasted years to figure that one out)
Which one worked for you?
I mean, unless you literally do nothing but sit in your room waiting for relationship to happen (which, I know, actually perfectly common in the COVID era), the micro-marriages framing would seem to suggest that you're accumulating them naturally simply by living your life. It may help you conceptualize optimization strategies, and motivate you to keep on living life instead of getting depressed and never leaving your room, but as far as "you have to do something" goes, it seems to imply the exact opposite. There's no particular thing that can be done, you just naturally do thousands little rolls of dice, several a day, each with a minuscule chance of success.
I'm speaking here as someone who neither intended to get married nor accumulated particularly many micro-marriage points throughout my life (I am depressed, not-leaving-my-room-for-weeks depressed at times, however little you think you've got, I'm most likely worse), yet somehow still ended up with a romantic partner. Most people eventually roll well, the crucial part appears to be following up and not rejecting the opportunity when it presents itself.
I interpreted the micromarriages framing as essentially 'go out and meet people'. Obviously if you sit in your room all day you're probably not going to meet anyone, but there are plenty of hobbies people are into that also are unlikely to produce many 'micromarriages' either (for example, taking long hikes alone).
As someone who accumulates essentially zero micromarriages (I work from home and in my spare time mostly hang out with the same group of college friends, all of whom are men), I definitely think that I would have more luck if I proactively went out and started doing things that involved talking to many women my own age.
Congratulations!
Congratulations are in order. Also thanks, I took this post as a much needed reminder that it's not too late for me.
Congratulations!
In the great marriage tradition of unsolicited advice, the best most succinct marriage advice I've seen is "love is a choice, not a feeling". Almost every marriage has "bitch eating crackers" moments - and a key is that the basis of the marriage can't be positive feelings: you have to choose to continue showing love to your spouse even when the positive feelings aren't there.
Oh I like this! <3
Can confirm that nearly eight years in we've both had those moments.
I've heard the similar phrase "love is verb, not a noun". Same motivating idea. It's an action you take and repeat rather than a passive occurrence.
In Non-Violent Communication they say "love is a need, not a feeling". You can feel close warm feelings at times, but not realistically all the time. I agree there will always be very bad moments, and it's good to expect them and overcome them, and try to minimize their occurrence.
There is plenty of opportunity for crude love-at-first-sight jokes
Many congratulations and best wishes to you both! Long life and great happiness, and may it go well! Kindly accept this virtual throwing of confetti, rice, and old shoes 😁
Marriage is a big step and it takes courage, so you both have done a brave thing. You are linking yourselves as one more link in the great chain that connects families and peoples and societies all the way back into the past, and helping carry that on into the future.
Don't worry about marrying at 37; my father was 35 and my mother was 31 when they married and they ended up with four of us kids (I admit, I am not the greatest inducement for "and here's a potential offspring" but your roll of the genetic dice, should you both decide to have children, will undoubtedly go a lot better).
Since you mentioned Chesterton, I'll also presume your wedding day went more smoothly (though maybe not more happily) than his:
"A man does not generally manage to forget his wedding-day; especially such a highly comic wedding-day as mine. For the family remembers against me a number of now familiar legends, about the missing of trains, the losing of luggage, and other things counted yet more eccentric. It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself; and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller. They seemed to me the most natural things in the world. I did not buy the pistol to murder myself or my wife; I never was really modern. I bought it because it was the great adventure of my youth, with a general notion of protecting her from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads, to which we were bound; where, after all, there are still a suspiciously large number of families with Danish names. I shall not be annoyed if it is called childish; but obviously it was rather a reminiscence of boyhood, and not of childhood. But the ritual consumption of the glass of milk really was a reminiscence of childhood. I stopped at that particular dairy because I had always drunk a glass of milk there when walking with my mother in my infancy."
Tolkien has a more pragmatic view, because making a marriage work *is* hard work:
"Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the 'real soul-mate' is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstance do most of it (though if there is a God these must be His instruments, or His appearances). It is notorious that in fact happy marriages are more common where the 'choosing' by the young persons is even more limited, by parental or family authority, as long as there is a social ethic of plain unromantic responsibility and conjugal fidelity. But even in countries where the romantic tradition has so far affected social arrangements as to make people believe that the choosing of a mate is solely the concern of the young, only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were 'destined' for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life (yet the greatest of these tales do not tell of the happy marriage of such great lovers, but of their tragic separation; as if even in this sphere the truly great and splendid in this fallen world is more nearly achieved by 'failure' and suffering). In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world."
May you both be happy, may you both be content, may you both be a strength and support to the other during the troubles of life.
Congratulations. Sometimes it is a good thing to throw one's lot in with someone else.
Congratulations!
Super many congratulations! And H/T Aella! Listening to Aella’s awesome weirdness. ….https://open.spotify.com/episode/32BmFQ1AgobWFmBsqJkEew?si=3uz_LEWVRyCQ0tkrTOjRUA
Mazel Tov! I'm so happy for you! May you have prosperity and joy and a the family you want! And yes, being hopelessly in love *can* last. I still stare at my partner while he sleeps, and we've been together for 14 years.
Congratulations!!
Congratulations!!!
I'm an anti-marriage rationalist myself. I don't need a contract to maintain loving commitment to my partner. We've been engaged (as we define it, which is a level of commitment beyond dating) for 22 years. Made easier by deciding to not have kids.
If we were to have had kids, a contract would have had been far more prudent, and more likely to have happened, however.
How have you arranged matters of medical proxy and inheritance?
Each of my financial accounts has her as the beneficiary, so the vast amount of my finances will seamlessly transfer to her in the case of my untimely demise.
We have made no arrangements for medical practices. I suppose a living will could help with at least part of that. I don't think you need to be married to afford access to designated representatives. Also, people tend to be reasonable. When they learn that we're long-term partners, I suspect people will do the right thing most of the time. And, even if not, I suppose my father would be contacted (or brother when my dad passes) and they would bring her in anyway to decision-making.
Ultimately, though, as you can see, I don't live my life to optimize for the government process of marriage rights and privileges. There's no doubt that we live in a system that encourages and rewards marriage. I get it because it provides additional social fabric cohesion, but I also happen to think it's coercive.
A few years ago, I was sitting on an airplane next to an airplane engineer of some sort (I don't remember the specifics). As was my wont, I asked him what's new in his industry, and he started talking about how one of the engine manufacturers recently announced they had a new design that would save on fuel costs by ~20%. He said normal incremental improvements weren't usually enough to spur new airplane purchases by airlines, but that this was big enough to drive some relatively large airplane orders.
This in turn set off a sort of 'bidding war' with the other two major engine manufacturers, who had to figure out how to also achieve a ~20% fuel reduction or miss out on the new round of plane orders.
I asked him how they managed to do that. Presumably, if they already knew how to squeeze an extra 20% fuel economy they would have. He said they did the same thing the first company did: they lied.
Or rather, they got some engineers to put together an engine that could 'theoretically' get 20% better fuel economy, but as is normal in the industry they sold it all without even a working prototype. That's because the engine, to work, would need to ignore a few minor details like the melting point of some of the materials it was made of. The practical engineers who would need to implement the design would have to completely overhaul the whole thing in order to even begin to make it work.
Since they would never be able to deliver what they promised, they wrote concessions into the contract. The airlines didn't EXPECT to get what they were promised, but they weren't going to pay for something less when it was delivered so the contract made sure they were compensated to the degree the manufacturer under-delivered.
This gave the manufacturer the incentive to try and provide as close as possible what they originally promised. After a few years of iterating, they would eventually get to the 20% improvement, but not until a lot of planes were already delivered.
I don't know if someone else here is more familiar with this process, but something about it feels apt to me in a post about marriage. Lots of excitement early on about major promises for future improvements. Later failure to deliver all that was promised (despite attempts to do so) because the promise was unrealistically high. Then, over time, the product is improved to the point where the original promise is finally realized. As someone who has over a decade of marriage under his belt, this feels like a good analogy.
Congratulations, Scott and +1.
Thank you for this surprisingly touching and appropriate story.
Twenty five years in, and yes, I agree - this is a very solid analogy.
I definitely expected this to end with you marrying the airplane engineer, but this is a really cool story anyway
That sounds like Robin Hanson on overconfident managers and the preferences for underestimating project times.
Congratulations and continued fortune!
Congratulations Scott! I wish you the best in your marriage.
You have lots of intellectual children now, so I think you'll do fine with some physical ones.
I know this is supposed to be for rationalists, but that is really cute.
Happy for you Scott. Every life needs those dials pegged at 100% every once in a while.
Best wishes, Scott!
Congrats!
Congratulations, Scott! Best to you both.
Mazal tov!
I wish you the joy of it. Tie yourself tightly to that mast.
Congratulations!!!!!
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
I completely understand the reluctance to blog about your personal life, but I'm so glad you didn't deprive us of the opportunity to rejoice with you!
Congratulations!
Mazal Tov!!!
One of the most wonderful things. Sincere congratulations.
Congratulations - this is a wonderful post and a wonderful new beginning. Wishing you both every happiness
Congratulations!
Congratulations, Scott!
I think in "increasing my cross section", which may be something similar to micromarriages.
"In physics, the cross section is a measure of the probability that a specific process will take place when some kind of radiant excitation (e.g. a particle beam, sound wave, light, or an X-ray) intersects a localized phenomenon (e.g. a particle or density fluctuation). For example, the Rutherford cross-section is a measure of probability that an alpha particle will be deflected by a given angle during a collision with an atomic nucleus. Cross section is typically denoted σ (sigma) and is expressed in units of area, more specific in barns. In a way, it can be thought of as the size of the object that the excitation must hit in order for the process to occur, but more exactly, it is a parameter of a stochastic process."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_section_(physics)
Wonderful! 15 years in myself and it only gets better and better. Congratulations to you and your beautiful bride!
Congratulations!
“Chris says: instead, think of yourself as getting 500 micromarriages each time . All you need to do is go to a thousand parties and you have a 50-50 chance of meeting the right person!”
I feel like the math here is a bit off. Surely you don’t just multiply the probability with the number of events to get the correct number, right?
I figured it out, apparently you can use the 1-(1-p)^n formula, n being the number of parties, and p the probability of finding a wife. The result will be the probability of finding a wife if you attend n parties.
if you attend 1000 parties and get 500 micromarriages each time, you would have a 39.3545% chance of finding the right person, while to get 50% chance you should attend roughly 1386 parties, which is even more discouraging.
Interestingly with that formula, removing the first "1-" if you find the limit as n goes to infinity and p goes to 0 you will get 1/e. And that's my story of independently discovering e.
Agreed—if we flip a coin twice, the probability of getting a heads is not 100% even though 0.5*2=1
This is a beautiful post -- thank you for sharing it with us. Congratulations to you both!
Thanks for sharing, and congratulations to both of you.
Mazel Tov!
My wife and I received this toast when we got married, and it really stuck with me: Welcome to the first of many marriages! May they all be with the same person. :-)
Congratulations to you both.
Dammit.
Just yesterday it occurred to me that I have no idea what you look like, and I resolved to not correct that.
So much for resolve. :D
From the title, I was afraid you were about to announce you'd died. Congratulations on much happier news.
That actually would be a good title for a dead man’s switch last message.
congratulations!!!!
Congratulations! Marriage is about the shared storied, and you are well on the way to a long and successful relationship. Wishing you and your significant other a lifetime of bliss.
Congrats!
Congratulations!!
Congratulations!
Congrats Scott! Thanks for sharing the good vibes :) and the micromarriages approach!
.مبارک باشه! امیدوارم خوشبخت شوید
Mazes Tov!!!
(Yes, autocorrect turned “Mazel” into “Mazes,” but I like it, so it’s staying)
Congrats! I've done it twice, once badly and once (apparently/so far/knock on wood) better. Yes it is a contract but....no it's not "like any other". It is in my own experience its own unique category for good and/or ill.
(And even while failing at it I never stopped wanting to learn and get better and try again. Very glad that I did.)
"Is it possible to like someone so much that the positive emotion builds on itself, grows stronger and stronger with every interaction"
Yes.
Invest in your joint future every single day. The currency is sacrifice.
It isn't even complicated. Just that few think it worth the price. They are fucking idiots.
This sounds as a very bad advice without context provided. Taken at a face value it's a recipe for getting into abusive/codependent relationship.
The main problem with being victim of abuse, as I understand it, isn't that you hate your partner even when they are just eating crackers. It's that you love them even when they beat you bloody. And then you forgive them, sacrificing your values not to be treated horribly for the sake of your joint future.
It only works right when both partners are cooperating, optimizing their joint utility function, sacrificing only when its optimal for the well-being of them both and knowing that their partner will do the same. And it is complicated. It requires lots of well deserved trust, lots of knowledge of each other and great abilities to communicate and update on evidence.
And that's why many people are not eager to do it. They are reasonably cautious and it has nothing to do with stupidity.
Congrats! Best of luck to the both of you!
Aaand here goes rationalist bachelor #1!
Congratulations!!
Congratulations! I have long used a game theory - restricting options - type description of marriage but I'm stealing yours now because it is better. Also: I like your suit, the purples go well together (I'm on a compliment men about their garments kick, it happens too infrequently and is an easy way to make people happier).
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
I'm one of those rare breeds that found success on Tinder. It's only been about 6 months with my current partner, but I still think about these questions of commitment a lot. The only metric I've ever found to be successful is the same one I used for deciding my job and college major - on my worst days ever, am I still going to pick this (person/job/field/etc)?
It's easy to choose in a euphoric happy mood or even your default. But is it still the decision you make when you wake up late for work, your coffee was wrong, your boss gave you extra projects, and some asshole cut you off in traffic on the way home?
If the answer is yes, chances are you're on the right path.
I never realized I wanted to know what a Scott Alexander article on marriage would look like until I saw it. So: thank you for taking time out of the rest of your life to share that with us. Wow. Enjoy the rest. I can't wait to see what it will be like, either.
Obligatory nerdpick re "exactly one million micromarriages later":
I think the number of micromarriages after which your probability of being married is 1/2, is that X for which (1 - 1/10^6)^X = 0.5. In LISP, that's (/ (log .5) (log (- 1 (/ 1 (expt 10 6))))) = 693146.9.
(That's 1 million times the natural log of 2. The simplification of the formula is left as an exercise to the reader.)
Your probability of being married at least once after 1 million micromarriages is
(- 1 (exp (* (expt 10 6) (log (- 1 (/ 1 (expt 10 6))))))) = 0.6321207
The expected number of the roughly 340,000,000 Americans alive today who would fail to find marriage after 10 million micromarriages is
(* 340000000 (exp (* (expt 10 7) (log (- 1 (/ 1 (expt 10 6))))))) = 15435.902
To estimate your own personal chances of getting married using standardized micromarriage values for particular social events, you must merely assume that all people are identical, and that your perceived desirabilities at different social events aren't correlated. If these conditions aren't met, you may wish to replace your native social responses with ones generated by GPT trained on a sufficiently large corpus of observed social behavior.
Scott, are all 100k readers of this blog invited to the wedding? :D Congratulations!
I love the idea of micromarriages. I would also point out that doing things like working out hard at the gym and losing weight down to 10-12% bodyfat will do wonders to improve one's rate of success. So if you had 500 micromarriage points at 20% bodyfat, you'll probably have 2000 micromarriage points at 12% bodyfat. Being attractive works :-)
Yeah. Invite all 100k in Minecraft.
Congratulations, Scott! Super stoked for you!
Congratulations! Wonderfully wholesome post.
I have used the advice of 'maximize the amount of low-probability chances' with dating as well (it does seem in a way like just a nerdy extrapolation of 'go outside and do things', but works online too!), with the other side I sometimes tell people being a Shelling point-like approach: 'imagine the types of places you might, by chance, encounter your ideal partner, and go to those places, whether it is a loud bar, an introverted book club, a role-playing video game, Twitter responses to an obscure poll, a niche discord server, or something even weirder'.
Having absurdly strong positive trapped priors with respect to another person sounds a lot like a nerdy definition of love to me, and in my opinion makes it worth pursuing all the more.
Mazel tov!
Mazel tov, you two lovebirds!
A good ending. Congratulations!
What a fascinating approach!
Congratulations and wish you both a lovely life together.
On staying married, I think there needs to be a commitment to the commitment. I think Westerners cut themselves too much slack on this one.
My advice to people trying to get married is to think about the type of person you like, and put yourself in places where they are likely to hang out. At some point, if you meet someone and connect, make a commitment without over-thinking it. :) What is over-thinking...? You'll know.
Best of luck!
A relationship (marriage, friendship...) should not be the means to an end, but the end in itself.
Aristotle said this better. One of my friends keeps bringing it up.
קול ששון, וקול שמחה, קול חתן, וקול כלה!
Re-met my wife in a role-playing one shot of blades in the dark I arranged to get over a breakup. We knew each other before, but she had a boyfriend at the time and it wasn't meant to be. Until it was.
What I'm trying to say - life is hilariously weird. Mazal Tov :)
"and exactly one million micromarriages later"
Unlikely.
Congratulations!
Really boring and incredibly pleasing comment section at the same time.
Nice photo too, although one from Aella's party would have been more interesting.
Congratulations!
Congratulations!
Congratulations Scott!
Congratulations. You're a good person, and you deserve to be happy.
For anyone looking to maximize their micro-marriages, I highly recommend some kind of dance class. Our salsa rueda class ended up pairing off half of the people who stuck with it, including me. It was a 500k micromarriage event!
Congrats!
Congratulations! May you have a long, happy life together.
(very cute post)
Wow, congratulations, Scott!
Many blessings!!!
Awesome, congratulations and best wishes to you and your wife - she can count herself extremely lucky!
Thank you for sharing Scott - many many congratulations
Congratulations!
Mazel tov! May your airplanes bound with ropes shine ever brighter!
From a longtime reader and never-commenter, I wish you long and happy marriage.
Congratulations! May God bless you and your bride!
Congratulation, Scott!
Mazal Tov!
I appreciate the micromarriages approach for the implicit message that if something didn't work, even many times, it doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with you that you need to change.
About Mt. Everest, for me agreeing to a setup is one. I've been set up far fewer than 30 times, and it resulted in my 2nd longest relationship and in my 1st longest: marriage + child. So definitely more than 30,000 micromarriages each.
Again, for me, OkCupid & tinder resulted in many dates and even a few cute people, but 0 serious relationships.
About the birth of a star, I don't think I know long relationships like that. I wonder why the negative spiral is so much more common...
Can you elaborate on how the "agreeing to a setup" works?
I meant something elementary, like this. Your roommate/sibling/coworker says "I have a friend I want to set you up with. Will you go on a date with them?" And you say yes and go on the date.
It's not something you can easily initiate (maybe ask for a setup? Haven't tried this), but you can make sure you don't turn it down.
All my life, I have been set up exactly *once* and it went nowhere. The "partnership market" and the "job market" share a lot of disconcerting similarities. If years go by and you are perceived by friends and acquaintances as "a perpetual loner", the chances of them "recommending you to someone" go exponentially down as you enter a negative feedback loop.
Same applies to being invited to parties. "A thousand parties"? Come on Scott, in a good year I'd maybe invited to 0.3 parties. Sheesh.
If I had kids, I'd give them the following rather cynical advice:
"Realize that prospective partners are a scarce and unequally distributed resource. To access it you'll need to go to great lengths, do things you find dumb, and suck up to the gatekeepers"
Anyhow, congrats to Scott on getting married and we look forward to a superbly, hyper-rationally optimized relationship upon which any number of scientific publications will certainly build!
Congratulations Scott! So overjoyed for you.
Congratulations!
(...but there's a slight math error in the micromarriage calculations. Assuming that each marriage attempt is independent, marriage probabilities multiply together, not add together. 1,000 500 µMar events does not add up to 50% probability of marriage. Trivial proof: 2,000 500 µMar events does not add up to a 100% probability of marriage, and 3,000 500 µMar events does not add up to a 150% probability of marriage. The correct formula is P(Marriage) = 1 - (1,000,000 - µMar/event)^(# events), which comes out to about 40% for a thousand 500 µMar events.
The additive approximation is pretty damned close for small numbers of events with low probabilities, so for the purpose of adding together, say, ten parties worth of potential marriages it makes sense to just add together micromarriages. But there's a philosophical difference in that there's no threshold of events you can accrue that will guarantee marriage (except marriage itself, which I guess is a 1 megamicromarriage event).)
Except that we should certainly NOT assume that each marriage attempt is independent. Say you regularly attend parties, but the other attendees are 95% the same at those parties. If your problem is meeting the right person, then the first party will give you 100% of your probability, while subsequent attendances will drop precipitously. OTOH, maybe the problem is that you need multiple encounters to make the association stick. In that case, your probability compounds each time you attend the same party, potentially in a geometric way.
In my experience, romance hits you like a sanding block on the subway. Impossible to predict in advance that it was going to hit you. Even when it's someone you already knew. Best policy is to keep your exposure up, but not worry too hard about it. You can't try harder to get in the way of random objects striking you on the head, but you can get frustrated that more random objects don't hit you if you're watching for them all day. Also, people are much more interested in people who are going somewhere with their life. You can't steer a parked car, in other words.
If the quantification game keeps people motivated, that's great. But I wouldn't consider it meaningful, since it relies on a lot of assumptions about the underlying relationships between events that are almost certainly unknowable.
I've heard another model for marriage, which is just that people marry whoever they happen to be dating when they get to the age where they decide they're ready for marriage. So to get married, you just need to have a steady string of partners, and wait.
The main danger in this model is that you have a too-far-from-ideal person in the partner slot when the music stops, so you need to make sure you have reasonably high standards for whom you date, but not so high that you've got nobody in that slot.
This model is even less romantic than the micromarriage model, but there's some truth to it too.
There's an implicit model of marriage that sees it like drawing a circle around two people who are naturally highly compatible, plus some social contract stuff thrown into the mix. Your job is to find a compatible person prior to drawing up the social contract. Failed relationships are poor pairings where a social contract was drawn up in error.
I think that's a very bad model.
Although I think there is a compatibility threshold that needs to be met, in my experience any relationship is defined more by the work you put into it (plus reciprocal work) than it is by initial conditions. This is why many couples report their relationship getting better as they mature, despite physical attraction having a reputation as aging like lunch meat. A relationship is a structure you build together. It's an entity in itself - or it will be at some point. At first, maybe it's just a nominal pairing of two people who like to be together. Eventually, it is its own edifice; a kind of built-up social capital with high subjective value.
I think all relationships are like this in a certain way, not just marriage. I recently went to my 20 year HS reunion. I recognized a bunch of people with whom I immediately realized I have no residual relationship anymore. It was like starting from scratch, even for people I used to spend time with every day. Our rapport reset had nothing to do with compatibility. It's just that the relationship itself had atrophied.
I'd also add to this - borrowing from catastrophe risk calculations in future discounting, where the longer you/a civilisation survives, greater the chance that you are in a "low background risks" environment - the more things you do that do not lead to a latching, you should update probabilities of you being fundamentally unlikeable/dateable/marriageable
ps. speaking of Kabbalistic significances, Maps' 'Love Will Come' was paused on my desktop spotify(I had started listening it before the article was posted) when I started reading this post. One of the first things I did when I sat at my computer today is to start reading ACX, and this song was paused from last night.
I guess there are "Bayesian" and Kabbalistic takeaways from my comment, in opposite directions
Gah, it's so beautiful! Congratulations, Scott, and thank you so much for sharing these reflections.
A marvelous post! After 42 years with the same woman, I like to think that I fit your metaphor of that giant blue star, but it ain't all rolling downhill to mix the similes
Holy crap!! Congrats Scott!
Congratulations! I see that a lot of commenters are themselves in happy marriages, but also some looking for advice on making the right choice:
I've heard this story relayed to me in China by an American who heard it in Egypt from the Orthodox Greek priest. In Orthodox Christianity you cannot get a divorce, and while priests are supposed to always conduct interviews, this seldom stops a marriage. This young Greek priest however took his role seriously, and asked five questions, and the partners, separately, had to have matching or positive answers. He claims, and my experience matches, that whenever a divorce happens, it's one of those five segments, so that's what to check:
1) Sexual preferences and attraction (do you find each other attractive)
2) Religion and Values (matching belief systems)
3) How to earn/spend money (work life balance, thriftiness or opulence)
4) How many children to have, when, and how to raise them
5) Where to live (city or countryside, which country, apartment or house...)
I'd add to this the prerequisite of respecting and being honest to each other, but this list covers everything. Within the first month of my last relationship I checked for all five, built a culture of honesty and respect with her, and we've been happily married ever since :)
My best friend married a Christian, and their pastor did something along these lines. I think it was an online questionnaire that they took separately, and they were scored on ~these five areas. In the ceremony, he said they got perfect compatibility scores on everything... except religion, where they were complete opposites. But I don't think religion is going to be an issue; they've already been together for eleven years.
Anyway this seems like a great practice, and I wish it was more readily available for non-Christians! I'd never even heard of it until my friend's wedding.
I wish your friend all the best, but I'd find it hard to be with someone of different religion, and have seen many happy relationships fail there. If you believe in a soul you might, just a bit less, swim to save our drowning child, knowing there's an afterlife for it. I exaggerate, but I'd be angry at tithe paid, or even time spent aiding a church, because I'm an atheist. So I'd still keep this practice aiming for 5/5
"If you believe in a soul you might, just a bit less, swim to save our drowning child, knowing there's an afterlife for it."
Maybe if you believe in a religion that has an afterlife but no commandment to self-sacrificial virtue. This would not be the case in, e.g., Christianity, a sincere believer would sincerely believe that there is an afterlife, but also sincerely believe John 15:12-13: 'This is my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.'
That said, you are right about being unequally yoked. For exactly the same reasons you cite, it wouldn't be fair to either party and should be avoided.
People with different religions can get by just fine if each of them has respect for the other.
Lots of people can't muster that.
Dedicated atheism to the point that you do not respect tithing or time spent doing work in the religion or proselytizing is definitionally excluded, and that’s what the commenter specified.
Or, maybe more willing to risk your own life to save child.
The five most common reasons marriages break up:
(1) Money
(2) Money
(3) Money
(4) Sex
(5) Religion
Congratulations on the supernatural unearthly beauty!
Congratulations ant all the best for your marriage.
Congratulations !
Congratulations! Marriage is fantastic. Once you have that commitment layer you can build something that transcends what seemed possible in any previous relationship.
Mazel Tov Scott! What a beautiful post.
Mazel Tov!
"For some reason neither Ozy nor I ever wondered about the opposite phenomenon. Is it possible to like someone so much that the positive emotion builds on itself, grows stronger and stronger with every interaction, until it’s one of those blue supergiant stars in the galactic core?"
Absolutely yes, and it's great. If you truly trust your spouse (and I mean trust their intentions with you, not just that they aren't lying or cheating), then you see evidence for that trust grow all over the place. Sometimes it's a false positive, but that just becomes something you can both laugh about later, when you do talk about that nice gesture they made and it turns out they were doing something completely different.
Also, like, congratulations on your wedding!
Congratulations, Scott. (And a bonkers 1-2-punch combo post to drive it home as well... well played!)
Mazel Tov - also as in, 'good luck'!
Congratulations! Live long and prosper!
What glad tidings! God bless you, Scott, and your wife; God favor your marriage and grant you many happy and fruitful years together!
Congratulations! This makes me unreasonably (since I know none of the people involved) happy. Best of luck for the future!
Big congratulations! Your commentary on Siren-infested waters is hilarious. Arguably it's a big event, and without the foresight to tie yourself to a mast, it can destroy a relationship. It got me thinking about John Gottman's work.
Over decades of research, Gottman’s top indicator of successful relationships is what he calls bids. Bids are the units of connection and how we show up in our relationships daily. (They're not Siren scale events.) Bids can be sexual, funny, serious. They can be in the form of a question (“how did your presentation go?”) or physical (a loving squeeze), or an expression (a long audible sigh after reading something stressful). The classic example is if they get excited about seeing a cool bird do you try to see the bird yourself? Do you ask more questions about the bird? Or do you say, “That’s nice, hun.” and go back to your book or whatever you were doing before you were interrupted by your partner. We tend to think about betrayals as these big moments, but these micro-actions significantly impact how we connect in the long run.
May you two always care for the small moments and acknowledge each other's bids as much as the milestones.
I recommend reading Andrew Gelman on Gottman:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/03/13/shooting_down_b/
Also Scott Alexander on John Gottman:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/
And that also references Ozy's typology of relationships.
Gelman's work is fascinating, thanks so much!
Spent some time today looking at each of these. So interesting (and humbling), thank you!!
Many many many congratulations and wishes for a long healthy happy life together!
🎉
Congratulations! May it be a long and happy union.
First of all, mazel tov!!!
Second, talking about Singaporean child tax credits on your 1st date, and then category formation in BPD and anomalously high suicide rates in the Inuit on your 2nd and 3rd dates... sigh! 😍 Oh, young looooooove! Again... sigh! 😍
I mean, I myself am too shy for naked parties (modulo proper COVID precautions, natch!) in general... let alone ones organized by rationalist luminaries like Aella who, moreover, have substantial general fame for being a super-successful "camgirl" pioneer and for writing voluminously and insightfully about high-end sex work of the contemporary online-mediated sort.
As such, lil' ol' shy me just used eHarmony.
I fondly remember that --- after eHarmony had matched me with a series 8 or 9 women over the course of about 18 months, leading to relationships of maybe 5 or 6 dates with 2 of the women, and then pretty much just moderately-fun-thanks-but-not-thanks introductory dates with the rest of them --- eHarmony matched me with the woman I married.
And with HER (again 😍 emoji are in order!), we talked on our first date about disability-adjusted life years and $/estimated-DALY-gained thresholds for WHO and other global public health interventions.
It was definitely true looooove. [See postscript for the added description honesty compels me to add.]
In closing, mazel tov once again!!!
PROMISED COMPELLED-BY-HONESTY POSTCRIPT: Alas, it was the sort of true loooooove that --- with the requisite preface that I'm admittedly straining for the most amusing-while-still-vaguely-accurate pop culture analogy readily at hand that I think would be likely understood by a wide swathe of this audience --- was kinda like the true looooove shared by Natasha and Bruce in the MCU. Suffice it to say she was a downright goddess who had sublimated a highly traumatic upbringing into super-highly functioning heroism, and I was (arguably) a brilliant physicist who definitely had an anger management problem on which I was mightily-but-unsuccessfully trying to keep a consistent handle. In the end, like Bruce, I failed to get a handle on it in any remotely timely fashion. Thus, like Bruce, I tragically broke up our true loooooooove. (However, I hasten to add that, unlike Bruce, I never physically endangered her in the course of helping her as best I could with her heroics. Moreover, I did not potentially cause dozens of collateral deaths and certainly cause many billions of dollars in collateral property damage. 🤦)
> And with HER (again 😍 emoji are in order!), we talked on our first date about disability-adjusted life years and $/estimated-DALY-gained thresholds for WHO and other global public health interventions.
This is great, but I have a worry that somewhere out there are people rading these examples and thinking that they need to find someone who shares their intellectual obsessions, and that this is going to be a massive limitation for them.
I just want to reassure these people that it's okay if your first date, or any subsequent date, doesn't sound like an Astral Codex Ten open thread (whether odd or even numbered). Philosophically-inclined people can also find love with less philosophically-inclined, more grounded people.
If your partner isn't a rationalist, you might want to be sure to have friends who are. In a world where many don't understand the profound limits of standard epistemology, I'd go crazy if I couldn't talk about rationalist-type stuff with my partner.
Also, rationalists can be so sweet. While most humans have a sincere desire to be kind, a lack of self-awareness hampers the praxis. People who realize the flaws with their self-model have a better shot at manifesting their good intentions and correcting their assholery.
But there are plenty of kindness-manifesting non-rationalists too.
Plus, people are often wrong about their list of love-worthy partner qualifications. I've certainly made this mistake repeatedly. My first error was to pursue the most intelligent man I could find. After 4 years of a disastrous relationship with a brilliant, kind yet highly dysfunctional man, I learned that other partner traits might matter more than raw intelligence. Next, one of my other favorite personality traits rose to the top of the list - rebelliousness/iconoclasm, so I dated/married a gives-no-fucks man who has a loving heart buried under rage that burns like hellfire. 10 years later, I escaped that terrifying and abusive relationship. Then as fate would have it, I was saved from my own bad decision-making when my current partner chose me. Current partner (of 5+ years) is remarkably unambitious, socially unassertive and manifests his geekiness mostly in the direction of video games rather than other intellectual pursuits (suffice to say, traits/tendencies that initially placed him in the friend zone)... and he's the best thing that ever happened to me. He is kind, smart-as-fuck but not in a flashy way, honest, grounded, patient and sexy in a way I didn't initially see. I'm so grateful that he persisted past the friend zone and list of ostensibly important partner characteristics :-)
Thanks for sharing. As a man who definitely... *floridly*... was "brilliant, kind yet highly dysfunctional" for a decade (or two), I want to second your experience by addressing myself to any readers out there who might be worrying they too are similarly in this dicey category of "brilliant, kind, yet highly dysfunctional".
While yes, keep hope alive: the gates of repentance and recovery are always open... <taking the Lord's name in vain deleted> it can take a LONG time... and some of those times it takes a LONG time are pretty <expletive deleted>ing obviously predictable. Better said, try to the utmost despite the personal angst involved to be circumspect about how dysfunctional you're being and how much "work" you'll be able to do in the foreseeable future to get yourself out of your rut. While there is the whole "in sickness and in health" ideal of marriage vows and -- indeed --- of any really committed relationship generally, there's also simultaneously the ideal of "if you love somebody, set them free...". Thus, even if:
1) you've found yourself blessed with some partner who sincerely wants to help you recover/become-your-better-self/et cetera,
2) you yourself honestly want this help and are able to nontrivially "do the work", and last but not least
3) your partner is *in no way naive* about the emotional toll helping someone can take,
then I still say --- indeed, I'm doubly emphatic in saying --- it's necessary to introspect and then discuss with your partner whether you're truly up for receiving the blessing they're lovingly offering you at this stage of your life.
Again, goodnight and good luck, y'all. For all those finding it a struggle, let me affirm: yes, it's a struggle, but in the end it can be a beautiful struggle.
P.S. If anyone can tell me who specifically I'm paraphrasing with that affirmation about it being a struggle, but it can be a beautiful struggle, I'd be most grateful. I have this amorphous memory that it came up in some early 2010s NPR interview with the singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle (son of singer-songwriter Steve Earle) about he (and his dad's) battles with addiction. But (1) I have yet to find a segment explicitly with the "beautiful struggle" language and either of the Earles, and (2) I can't clearly remember whether the notion came up clearly as a quote of someone else.
P.P.S. I'm well aware that Justin Townes Earle in the end tragically died of an accidental overdose of cocaine laced with fentanyl. The "can" and "struggle" are key words, alas, in the phrase "... but it can be a beautiful struggle." 😔
Your writing makes me smile :-)
Re: dysfunctional - I myself 'identify' as pretty damn dysfunctional, having spent most of my life like a leaf in the wind (in reference to Scott's description of BPD - https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/16/borderline/), and thus I am the recipient of my partner's blessing (patience).
The dysfunctional man I referenced is usual, though can't be singular (could he?). He was a hoarder of inoperable vehicles and other large items; always had grand plans about what he was going to construct from parting out such things, yet tragically little follow-through; had a seeming desire to live in poverty, or at least his decisions always seemed to lead there (despite having highly valuable infosec skills); would periodically respond to other men with animalistic aggression (e.g. pointing a shotgun at someone's face after a verbal altercation). At the same time, he never lifted a finger against me, loves animals and has unique relationships with them (training cats to ride on his shoulder as he walks around town), and had a strong desire to fix the world's problems (he was obsessed with sustainability before it was a popular idea). Beautiful soul.
After more than a decade I'm finally over my irritation with him for steering me into a very difficult life for those years (which included living in a camping tent during a <0°F winter, literally being hungry, and consistently having people mad at us for overstaying our welcome and/or leaving inoperable vehicles on their land), and now I just think of him with affection and sadness. His life has been so hard, mostly because of his own actions. But he did not *choose* to be dysfunctional. I wonder if there is anything I could have done to help him escape his own vortex.
May all beings escape their self-sabotaging dysfunctions and thus minimize their suffering!
"Your writing makes me smile :-)"
First, aw shucks. 😊
Second, thanks for sharing again more of your life experience. I say that in particular since one of the first posts on ye olde Slate Star Codex to really make an impact on my po' po' lil' brain was:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/ ,
which was about all the hidden challenges and downright ordeals of hair-raising suffering that seem freakin' secretly *omnipresent* if you're in you're a doctor in certain subfields of medicine (most obviously, psychiatry or emergency medicine) or --- I might add --- if you're anyone who's partaken in recovery groups or found yourself living on "the wrong side of the tracks" at any point in one's life.
So, after reading your comment, I then naturally thought (well, "naturally" for me, at least), "Hmmm... I wonder how many people are within, say, 2 degrees of separation of me who have similar extended stretches of 'highly out-of-the-ordinary housing'?" (I use the phrase "highly-out-of-the-ordinary-housing" since I'm not sure you'd call the situation you shared homelessness.) Next, I clicked back to read that old "How bad are things?" SSC post hoping it'd save me from having to dive down a Google Scholar rabbit hole trying to find methodologically solid and up-to-date lifetime prevalence statistics for "homelessness", preferably in a broadly defined sense that would capture your situation (which, again I'm not sure you consider "homelessness").
So, after maybe 10 minutes of having multiple tabs open, including papers covering methodological challenges in surveying homelessness and cross-national comparisons (and methodological challenges in comparing cross-national surveys of homelessness... oh my!), I remembered "Oh right, I'm trying to rein in my hyperfocusing neuroses and not give into the ever present temptations of the the internet! I have to go to bed, and thus I need to draw this comment to a close sooner rather than later." 🙄
Thus, I decided to content my curiosity tonight with the following solitary, authoritative-seeming-yet-nicely-non-paywalled reference. Though I only skimmed it, and though I'm a physicist not a public health physician, I nonetheless commend it to y'all:
Jack Tsai [Yale University School of Medicine]. "Lifetime and 1-year prevalence of homelessness in the US population: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions-III", _Journal of Public Health_, Volume 40, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 65–74, https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdx034
TL;DR -- 4.2% is the estimated prevalence among adults as of 2017 in the USA answering affirmatively the following question: "Since you were 15, did you have a time that lasted at least 1 month when you had no regular place to live-like living on the street or in a car?"
In closing, wow... that was perhaps an overly long roundabout way to come back to "hey, thanks for sharing your experiences again"... but what are the comment threads of ACT for if not that trio of important thingies:
1) Internet-enabled penpalling with like-minded individuals,
2) Encountering new facts and ideas off the beaten path,
3) Being enmeshed in one constant therapeutic exercise in not letting oneself get lost down internet rabbit holes?! 😉
I quoted "How Bad Are Things" in my book, Fewer, Richer, Greener.
Right you are, Melvin. Indeed, before I digressed into schtick with the whole Natasha and Bruce MCU analogy to my relationship and sorta lost my train of thought, I was thinking I should include my comment some general encouraging advice like yours... after all, Scott's post is entitled "There's a Time for Everyone".
So seconding that theme as well as your point, Melvin:
1) While we still dating, this Saturday Night Live parody of eHarmony aired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6YUm2For-8. We definitely laughed at it, and many of our friends and family thought it applied to us. That said, while we definitely had a lot of interests, attitudes, and quirks that overlapped, we also had many that didn't. And, indeed, I do think people in general should be easy-going about having interests, attitudes, and quirks that don't overlap... and that probably goes double or triple for rationalist and rationalist-adjacent people who might be a little, ahem, *extreme* compared to the norm in their particular personal interests.
2) While I similarly digressed into schtick about being too shy to go to a whacky Aella-hosted naked-but-with-COVID-precautions party even if I were in that niche of the Bay Area rationalist scene, I want to emphasize to any readers that are thinking reading Scott's (or, to a much lesser extent, my) story
"Oh, that's all well and good for you that you eventually found true looooove, but I'm *PAINFULLY SOCIALLY ANXIOUS* and can't imagine even going through the ordeal of multiple dates with one potential partner to assess their potential, let alone all this accumulation of "micromarriages" with all sorts of strangers to accumulate eventually an adequate number of potential partners that I find true loooooove!"
Well, I was PAINFULLY SOCIALLY ANXIOUS. And it was definitely painful over like a 2 year period to not be utterly driven mad by the anxiety surrounding dating, but it was worth it.
3) True loooove can end in divorce. And even if you're a monogamous person like myself who can't really imagine personally adopting polyamory to cope with the fact even your true looooove sometimes can't meet all your needs (and --- hopefully needless to say --- not just romantic or sexual, but also emotional and intellectual), and even though breakups are painful... it's worth it.
4) That said, try NOT to have true loooove end in divorce. I once heard the comedian Marc Maron say something like, "There came a point in every one of my marriages that ended in a divorce where I thought, 'Yeah, I know she really needs me to do this thing, but <expletive deleted>, I know I'm not going to do that thing.' " Now, having that thought does NOT need to be followed immediately by the thought "Yup, time to call the divorce lawyer." But, with the painful wisdom of <expletive deleted>ing up true loooooove, I strongly encourage any of y'all having that thought to treat it with the utmost priority until you find a mutually agreeable compromise with your partner or you both realize that it's time to part amicably.
Not sure that was inspirational or useful to anyone but me, but I thought I should write it all. Goodnight and good luck.
Congratulations to you both!
I’d like to leave it at that, but can’t let this pass without comment: “COVID is 2,500 micromorts per infection”.
Surely this is a meaningless figure. Your personal COVID infection micromorts depend primarily on your age, then on pre-existing conditions & vaccine status, then on sex & obesity (or maybe race and smoking status). Whatever the exact balance and ordering, risk varies enormously from person to person. It’s unhelpful to assign one figure for all.
All figures are meaningless - the Mt. Everest one clearly depends how experienced a mountaineer you are, how many supplies you bring, etc. It's all abstraction.
Fair enough. Thanks for reply.
Congratulations!
When my wife and I got married, we had a thing where we got all our older married guests offer a piece of marriage advice. While I won’t be so presumptuous as to offer my own attempts at wisdom, I thought I might pass along the ones that have stayed with me the most in the 14 years since then.
From my great grandmother: “Say yes to everything!”
From an aunt with 9 children: “Sleep while you can.”
Have a great life together!