Get married.

Last weekend me and my wife had our full “wedding” after eloping a year ago. It was of course really fun, if a little stressful, to get to celebrate our relationship with friends and family. While the event is still fresh in my mind I wanted to talk a little bit about why marriage, in particular young marriage, is so important.

Specifically, I wanted to speak to the young hetero men who read this publication; you are, according to my community poll and anecdotal data, a huge part of whatever “this” is. Not only that but I also really care about y’all a lot. I’m of the opinion that far too much of the content online is either directly attacking you for the crime of being a young man or trying to exploit your frustration for ad revenue. Therefore I have a feeling of obligation to at least lodge my take in this putrid swamp of discourse, which is slowly seeping into all of life because of the centrality of heterosexual love.

Everything I write here is directed towards young hetero men. There are obviously other perspectives on life and I encourage people to write more articles about why love is important from every angle.

In short, you should get married young to a woman you love. Then you should hold onto that marriage with the white-knuckled intensity a vow on that scale deserves.

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The time between 18 and 28 disappears in the blink of an eye and if you aren’t careful life, in all its wonder and pain, will pass by you unlived. Humans are, at least based on everything I’ve seen and read, naturally monogamous creatures. Monogamy is of course, like all virtues, imperfectly manifested in everyone but it is a virtue nonetheless.

Having a wife is what you were meant to do at this stage of life; and being human is the only possible moral system. And like anything you are well adapted for, a good wife will make your life better full stop.

Of course this relationship will change with time and a lot of what you are initially attracted to about a person, whether it’s competence, physical features, or their success, will come and go but when I look at people who have been married for decades what always remains is a deep respect for their partner in life. We enter relationships to continue the species and to find companionship in this lonely and rocky life; the second part in particular I feel is often forgotten.

But the first part, reproduction, is also important and it is one of the most beautiful things about heterosexual marriage. I don’t think people appreciate how incredible it is that every young hetero couple is walking around with the ability to create more life!

To this day probably my favorite single episode of a TV show, S1E3 of The Last of Us, followed the story of ‘Bill and Frank’ as they fall in love during the apocalypse. The episode ends with them collectively committing suicide as Frank wastes away from a terminal illness and the final shot is their house, and the whole town, sitting empty and quiet.

This is what all of life would be like without children! A beautiful journey but one whose ending would be tragic in its finality. Bill and Frank have a beautiful relationship but it has a deadline to it that wouldn’t have been true if they had been able to have kids. Yes we all die in the end but the next generation carries on the torch through their own journey from birth to the grave; retracing old roads and paving new ones.

By having a family you restart the cycle again and you also become one person with your spouse forever.

I mean become one person both metaphorically and literally. Since if you only have children with one woman, from a biological perspective there are no longer separable entities, every descendant of yours will be as much her as it is you; together you will echo in eternity.

Of course all of this is true regardless of the age you get married at, assuming you are still within the fertile range, but getting married young has another major advantage. Your brain loves it.

In one of the episodes of Rick and Morty he describes love the following way:

What people call "love" is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard, Morty, then it slowly fades

Sure I think this is basically true, but people seem obsessed with extending this evolutionary logic only to love. No one is walking around saying that “not torturing small animals is just a chemical reaction that compels you to be kind” but that is also true!

Love really does just hit different when you are young and everyone who denies it is coping. There is a relatively narrow band of age in your 20s that your body is screaming at you to pair bond with someone else. It throws the entire kitchen sink of emotions at you to try and pull this off which you can either enjoy as a special part of life or pretend that it is stupid because it can be explained.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. - Carlyle

Fine, so I’ve convinced you. But how can someone do this? How can they get married young? Well if you are old you can’t, alas life is unfair like that, but if you are still young just talk to girls.

You have been conditioned by almost a decade of social media and education that this is wrong. Perhaps they are even right and you should meekly keep your eyes down and your feelings bottled out of “respect” but I say fuck that. Life is too short to live in fear of what strangers will say. Obviously, and this should go without saying, you should not do anything illegal but take every opportunity you have to chat with women.

Maybe America isn’t the place for you but there is a whole world of women you can talk to and many of them would literally crawl over broken glass to come to this country. The goal here is just to develop confidence because truly confidence is everything, and at the end of the day the only way to become confident talking to women is through practice and exposure, just the same as everything else in life.

In conclusion: do what you were placed on earth to do and talk to women.