|
First, "settling" is a highly offensive term. Anyone using that term is living in a fantasy world. I read the author as using it facetiously, though, since that is pretty much the point of the article. 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. |