Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough

But during the 20 years of marriage, the way we met didn't matter. Marriage is something else than about that initial burst of lust, or gushing romance or whatever. When you get woken up at 4 in the morning by your soulmate because the dog needs to go outside to pee and she certainly isn't about to leave the warm bed, believe me, romantic love is not what makes you jump out of bed.

I think we have unrealistic expectations about romance. Living together is freaking hard; giving up one's independence and having to be ready to compromise about every damned last thing in life (except maybe what you do in the potty) is hard. And once you compromise, if you're smart and want to stay happy, you have to be enthusiastic about the compromise, or you get bitter. Be happy, even when you didn't get what you want.

Still, despite all the compromises, all the things we had to work out, here I am 20 years later, and the love I had for her on that first day we met seems like a pale imitation to what I feel today. You have to work at it, and you end up with something a lot more. I don't know about settling, but instant love connection or not, making the marriage work is the hard part, and the real love in life comes from that work.

Second, she soundly observes that marriage is basically a business partnership, except she considers it nonprofit (I do not). Assuming you aren't somehow committed to the single life, you should evaluate marriage opportunity based on your appetite for risk and a frank assessment of the opportunity at hand. Just as you shouldn't base decisions on sunk costs, you should ignore illusory opportunity costs. Physical capital decays, if you want a return on it you'll have to take a risk before it loses all of its production capacity. Of course, the older you get without taking a plunge, the easier it becomes to see the illusory nature of the opportunity cost you might have been using.

This all assumes you have a marriage opportunity that you can see having a profitable return (profit measured in happiness here). I would go so far as to say that it's impossible to judge marriage as an institution to be inherently profitable for you personally; it will always depend on the particulars. You might think marriage sounds like the place you want to be, but if you don't find a good partner for yourself in particular, marriage isn't for you.

As long as you don't have kids and both spouses have careers, getting out of the marriage is relatively easy. On the other hand, you only get one life, don't waste it avoiding risks whose most catastrophic downsides are not that bad.

I have assumed you aren't marrying a black widow or having kids with an affinity for patricide/matricide. But worrying about the latter is like worrying about being hit by lightning while not batting an eyelash over driving a car regularly. Avoiding the former is a matter of due diligence.