As a woman, I'm not sure if marriage is as simple as a checkbox of wants, needs, desires, and luxuries. A lot of people seem to model these things as a game whe

As a woman, I'm not sure if marriage is as simple as a checkbox of wants, needs, desires, and luxuries. A lot of people seem to model these things as a game where there is some sort of fitness function that needs to be maximised and so on, but I'm not sure if that works too well. In the middle of the 20th century, von Neumann and his ilk predicted nuclear war with absolute certainty. So certain were they in their conviction that they in fact advocated a first-strike policy by the US, but that war never came. The models were adjusted to include repeated games and then people said, that's the reason why we haven't blown up. (see: http://www.scu.edu/business/economics/workingpapers/upload/Field-Schelling-paper-af2013c.pdf http://www.scu.edu/business/economics/workingpapers/upload/F... ) But rationally speaking the game of global annihilation was a single game - the person who moved first would have the fewest people die and then there would be no more games, so their analysis doesn't quite hold up. Indeed there have been times where people have tried to destroy the world, but someone, somewhere down the chain of command has said no and prevented that outcome. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov ) Maybe, just maybe, we should accept that while looking at the world through the lens of game theoretic models is useful for a lot of applications - it isn't the be all and end all of human society. There are women out there who do indeed care about those points and want to "better" their rank within the game they play. There are others for whom that game doesn't even exist and they can be just as desirable and amazing as the first group. So at the end, you could very well end up not playing the game and have a shot at a pretty decent life and find some happiness.