> For myself, these hard statistical realities have increasingly robbed me of the romantic impulse. Marriage to me now seems absurd. An empty, pyrrhic victory.

> For myself, these hard statistical realities have increasingly robbed me of the romantic impulse. Marriage to me now seems absurd. An empty, pyrrhic victory. I don't follow why that is. Just because the world's fucked up doesn't mean exclusive devotion to another person doesn't have its romantic appeal. There was some philosopher I was reading about the other day who posited that the "free love" crowd weren't really free because they were slaves to whims and circumstance. A truly free person, as I gather, is one who decides and acts independently of personal feelings and circumstance. Ergo, if you don't want to give yourself to your partner, do it anyway. Not out of external obligation, but out of the commitment you decided to make to them. In that perspective, committing to lifelong unconditional love is one of the few victories we have over being mechanical cogs in a sensational machine. What makes this even better, though, is when you're loving someone unconditionally, it's usually hard for them not to return some of that love sooner or later. So you build a gradual virtuous cycle. Someone's just gotta make the first move.