I wouldn't agree that you always marry the "wrong" person. I will admit that truly happy long-term marriages are exceedingly rare, an educated estimate I have r

I wouldn't agree that you always marry the "wrong" person. I will admit that truly happy long-term marriages are exceedingly rare, an educated estimate I have read is that it is maybe about 10%. Then we have the well-known statistic that about 50% of marriages end in divorce. About 90% of those divorces are initiated by the woman, and in most of those cases the man ends up paying the woman while have access to his children diminished. The 40% that don't get divorced despite being unhappy are "making the best of it," as you say. I suspect most of those people are "doing it for the kids." Chris Rock joked that those 40% simply "don't have the courage to leave." Given that 90% of divorces are initiated by women, this would imply that 85% of men do not have the courage to initiate a divorce regardless of how unhappy or dire the circumstances may be. The "optimal" mathematical strategy described in the article is also known as the "Secretary problem" and is definitely something worth pondering. The TLDR of the post is that, if you believe that you can attract up to 8 candidate partners, then you should pass on the first 3 candidates and then only stop when the next candidate is better than all prior ones. If you think that can attract up to 100 partners, then the optimal strategy is to pass on the first 9 candidates. Now this is just a mathematical model, with lots of assumptions, but the crucial point that it conveys is the importance of evaluating and passing before deciding, if you want to improve your chances of having a happy marriage. Knowing know dismal the actual statistics are, and how great the risks are, it would behoove an unmarried man to proceed with extreme caution when considering legally binding relationships or marriage contracts.