Marry the First Person You Date

I'm only slightly exaggerating

I see a lot of articles and essays titled things like How to Pick a Partner or What to Look for in a Spouse, and I’m certainly too lazy to look for a lot of examples, but I’m also certain you’ve also seen this type of thing before on the internet. Some of them are more reasonable than others. Some are a little too extreme when it comes to listing criteria that must be met before the author deems a potential candidate worthy of anyone’s hand in marriage. The biggest problem with them is not the specific advice offered, but the underlying assumptions that are being reinforced with the unmarried reader who, presumably, is the intended audience of such a publication.

My intent is not to convince you to literally marry the first person you date, but to disassemble those assumptions and offer an alternative framing.

Often, these essays will start by describing what a good, healthy marriage looks like. A good spouse is supportive, kind, and romantically engaged in the relationship. You find them sexually attractive and he or she finds you sexually attractive. Your goals and values align, you communicate openly, they’re funny and they also find you funny. They should be materially well-off to at least some extent or have the potential to be—don’t marry a loser. Also, they need to challenge you, otherwise you’ll never grow. They need to be as smart as you or smarter, but sometimes the writer argues that dumber can be good too.

This is where things start to fall apart because the range of advice wildly varies from “men should only ever marry dumb broads who don’t know what’s good for them” to “if you’re not marrying the highest IQ individual you can impregnate, you’re subjecting your kids to a lifetime of being [redacted].”

Obviously, some of that advice is good. Yes, in an ideal case scenario, your spouse is supportive and kind and all that. That’s good advice, and let’s assume your unmarried reader is smart enough to discern the bad advice and ignore it. What ends up happening, though, is that the discerning reader still comes away with the perception that there are criteria to be met by a potential partner that need to be met before that person can be in consideration for spouse status. The reader sees this mental check list with boxes that need tick marks. Every empty box or every blood-red X instead of a green checkmark tell the reader to abandon ship, turn around and run the other way. This is the fundamental problem with such advice.

The worst consequence of the checklist approach is that it reinforces a common modern misperception—one that drives low fertility rates and creates a lot of disenchantment, fatigue, depression, and ennui. The fundamental error being made is thinking that perfection is possible.

Whether in romance or with kids, one must understand that perfection in real life is impossible, and when you set an impossible standard, you guarantee that no real life person—no matter how objectively great they may be—will ever meet that high bar. When you say that your ideal spouse is supportive, you might think that you’re setting the bar at the bare minimum. In fact, you are opening the door to questioning every single thing your romantic partner says and does to answer the impossible question of whether they are supportive enough.

Yes, your husband or wife should be loving and kind, but is your current boyfriend or girlfriend loving and kind enough? When they said that thing they just said, did they mean it? Is there another person out there for you who could’ve said the right thing? The thing you so desperately needed to hear? The thing that you didn’t even know you need to hear, but when they said it—that perfect person who knows you better than you do—it became so suddenly clear that they are your one and only?

You can apply the same impossible standard to any feature of a partner, from personality to genetics. Are they smart enough? Are they tall enough? Do they appropriately value your incredibly niche hobby of collecting funny-shaped dandelion heads that you dry and store for future exhibition when the world finally matures enough to appreciate the majesty of a double-headed dandelion flower collection and give you the time and space you need to invest into this new artform that will surely sweep the world off its feet a decade or two from now?

My preferred approach to marriage has actually already been perfectly described by Amber Trimble.

Look, I’m sorry, but Disney movies aren’t real life. There is no one person in the world who is perfect for you. There is no such thing as a soulmate. Not only should you not romanticize marriage, you should also not try to make it into some sort of game in which you’re trying to attain a high score. Prince Charming doesn’t exist and neither does a genetic match that ideally maximizes your offspring’s potential.

The fact of the matter is that most marriages work perfectly fine because people make them work. Folks back in the day used to marry the guy or girl down the street at eighteen and make that marriage last until one of them kicked the bucket at eighty. Almost every single successful marriage you see around you right now is the product of complete randomness; these people met in college, these people had mutual friends, and that couple were next door neighbors and childhood friends. It’s not romantic, but it’s the truth: you can have a successful marriage with multiple people.

What would’ve happened had those childhood friends’ parents not decided to move into neighboring houses? One of them would’ve married their high school sweetheart and the other would’ve been single until 27 when they finally managed to work up enough courage to talk to a girl. Either way, they would’ve been fine, and the chances that their marriages would’ve been successful were about the same, regardless of circumstances.

The reason a marriage is successful—the reason those seemingly perfect spouses check every box on the checklist—is because they’re already married. When you’re married to someone, you owe them a whole laundry list of things and they owe you. You’re supposed to be supportive and kind. You’re supposed to be sexually attracted to your partner and try your best to be sexually attractive to them. You’re supposed to upkeep the romance by planning date nights and smacking her ass as she passes you in the kitchen. Your conversations are good because you try to make them good instead of letting them go stale and dry.

The problem with looking for perfection is that you blind yourself to the reality that good enough is perfection in its own right. When you’re dating someone, the questions you should be asking aren’t a list of criteria they need to meet, but the basic question of whether you can make a marriage work with this person. Will you be able to keep giving it your all? Will they keep reciprocating? Because if the answer is no, then it doesn’t matter how many shoes Cinderella tries on, there’ll never be one that fits perfectly.

A form of paralysis by analysis grips modern men and women. They’re constantly on the lookout for a better option than the one that’s immediately in front of them, and the options are seemingly infinite. Dating apps create an illusion of a massive pool of candidates—and it’s true, the pool is massive, when looked at from a bird’s eye view. The problem is that your actual options aren’t the one you currently have versus all those others you could potentially have. Your options are the few people you date during a relatively short window of time before it’s too late to make a decision. The options are always the ones that are immediately in front of you, whether that’s your high school boyfriend or your buddy’s girlfriend’s friend.

If you keep searching for the perfect one, you’ll find no one instead. Others, however, will settle. Yes, settle. It’s not a nice word to use when describing someone you call the love of your life, but the reality is that we all settle or risk remaining lonely. It’s called settling down for a reason. There’s a whole world of billions of people and the chances are that there could be someone else who’s technically slightly more befitting the position of your spouse. You choose to stick with the person you have rather than the field of candidates because choosing the field is choosing no one at all. The field isn’t an option, only the imperfect, flawed, fallible people you happen to have in your vicinity.

The lesson that you can make a marriage work with lots of different people can also be applied to finding the right mother or father to your children. There is randomness in relationships as there is randomness in procreation. Your spouse’s personality can suddenly change two or twenty years from now. No matter how hard you try to pick a perfect candidate, you cannot predict every element. Similarly, there is a lot of chance when it comes to having kids. It’s true that having kids with someone tall maximizes the chance that your kids inherit those height genetics, but there is no rule that guarantees that your kids won’t instead inherit your funny-looking ears. The fact remains that there is too much uncontrollable randomness in procreation, and treating the search for a spouse as some sort of game to get the most points—whether in inches or IQ—is a terrible way to think about having kids. The randomness of procreation will give you children you cannot control for, and you will love them regardless of whether they got your ears or not.

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To be clear, my advice isn’t to marry someone who you dislike or someone who’s abusive. The chances that your first boyfriend ever is the best one you can pull are low. Not because there’s something wrong with the boys in your high school, but because you’re too young to know how to make a relationship work and you haven’t had enough life experience to know a good thing when it’s staring you in the face.

But if you are dating someone and everything’s going more or less okay—they’re not abusive and they have a job and you don’t actively hate coming home from work and seeing them every day—my advice is to avoid asking if they’re perfect or if perfect can be found on an app, and to start asking yourself if you can make a marriage work with them. For example, can you see them married to anyone at all? If so, why can’t that be you?

While my friends and I got lucky in terms of finding spouses, I get the sense that there are a lot of people our age and younger who have let many perfectly decent relationships collapse instead of developing them into something greater because they didn’t understand that what they currently have is about as good as it gets. Sometimes you see people settle down with someone and the person they chose is not really all that much better in any objectively measured way than the people they dated previously. If the reason for settling down is that you matured enough to finally reach that point, that’s one thing, but if you’re bouncing from one relationship to the next in hopes that the next one will be the one, you’ve failed to have that maturing realization that the one is simply any one that you actively invest in and that invests back into you.