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Mottizens who have dated: what percentage of your partners would you say were Marriage Material? How many Marriage Material partners did you have a shot with?
I'll define Marriage Material here as any of: you would have wanted to marry them OR wish you would have married them OR you feel in an objective sense they "deserved" marriage even if you didn't really want to.
Partner and had a shot with I'll mostly leave to you. I'd say anyone after age 16 with whom you had a romantic relationship that lasted more than 5 dates or with whom you made love while in a romantic relationship. But I feel like that inquiry is more fact specific and context dependent.
For me: it's 5/25 I'd say could have or should have married, including my wife who I did actually marry. A rate of 20%, and five real opportunities across my youth. I could fiddle one or two either way, but after that it's a steep dropoff into people I couldn't imagine being with today.
I think it's about ~3/20 for me. Some of the women in the Not Marriage Material category are very nice people that I have nothing but fond memories of, but they just weren't smart enough to be someone that I'd want to spend my remaining years with. A couple of them were actually pretty terrible people, but came around at times that I needed an ego boost, or that I was desperate enough to tolerate terribleness. The three that were in the Marriage Material group:
Girlfriend that I was with for nearly three years during grad school and the beginning of my postdoc. Foreign, very religious, sweet demeanor, very attractive. She's probably a fantastic wife and mother. We eventually had too many conflicts - language, religion, her dislike of my hobbies, me generally being an asshole for no good reason at that age, and more. If we'd met at a different time, I probably would have figured it out, although I suspect I wouldn't have been happy. She deserved to be treated better and I hope she has been.
Brief fling with a girl that worked in my lab for the summer. Genuinely amazing person, absolutely hilarious, very kind. I have nothing but positive things to say about her, but she went back to Scotland after summer and we didn't try to make that work.
My wife. Marrying her was among the easiest decisions I've ever made in my life. We've been together over a decade and have never had an actual argument. I think I could reroll life many times and never find someone that I fit with more easily.
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