Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
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.
Agreed. Which is why I'm asking it on here rather than in person, for fear I'll never be able to talk to David and Melissa the same way again, or something like that. What brought the question up for me was watching an old episode of Sex and the City with my wife, where a character asserts that one only gets two "great loves" in one's life, so because she whiffed on the first she has to try harder on her second chance; the naughty implication being that the protagonist has used up her two great loves and is still single, meaning she is doomed! Because I watch RomComs like a male autist, I became curious what the average number of good partners a person like me (a modal mottizen) has a shot with in their life.
This is an obvious corollary response to people asking "Where have all the good men/women gone?" Not just "Well I got married so I was able to find one, you can too" but "Across my twenties I had 3-5 opportunities to marry someone decent, you can expect to have about that many shots if you're conscientiously looking." On average, should I advise a 22 year old that they have three (3) bites at the apple? Seven (7)? One (1) so you better take it when you get it? Obviously it is one hundred percent incidental and individual, but I'm curious how the averages play.
I'd also note that for me, anyway, the regret aspect looks more like "Wow, I should have been more careful with A/J/S's hearts, they deserved better" than "I would be happier if I weren't with Mrs. FiveHour." I'm very confident I made the best choice for me, but trading life stories, I feel bad about some ex partners. And of course, my wife and I never tire of counterfactuals when we're stoned: what would my life be like if she had gone to Penn State and I had married that Black girl who has an MfA and teaches poetry now? What would her life be like if UVA had come through with a scholarship for me and she had married her best friend who spent our college years mooning over her? Would I be an evangelical if I had married A? Would she have converted to Greek Orthodoxy if she had married G? It's fascinating, especially because we married young, so subtracting each other from our lives means starting over at the character creation screen at 19.
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