Marriage Isn’t the Risk. The Wrong Partner Is | (#099) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the bigger question behind what you’re building, and I’m your host, David Tian.

Let me present to you a quick story. There are four men at a dinner table on a Thursday night. One of them is 11 months into a divorce. He’s the one doing most of the talking. He tells them about the house he’s going to lose, about the filing date, about the number his lawyer quoted him. He says that number out loud the way you might report the weather, and then he takes a drink of his wine or whiskey, and then stops, and the other three guys don’t say much.

One of them says something about “How hard this must be for you.” Another one asks about the kids, and then the conversation goes somewhere else, and the evening ends, and everybody drives home. But all three of the other guys are doing the math, and none of that math is actually about their friend. It’s all about themselves. [00:55.6]

Let’s follow one of them home, and we’ll see why. This guy is 43. He has been seeing someone for two years and she’s good to him so far. He likes who he is when he’s around her, which isn’t a small thing at 43 years old. His friends like her. His mom has asked about her twice so far. He has not proposed yet, and when he’s asked about it, he says, “Hey, it’s a timing thing,” or there’s a raise coming up or there’s a move, or the year coming up is going to be busier than the last one. But it isn’t about timing and he knows it is not about timing, and he’s a careful enough thinker that he knows that he knows.

So, let me tell you what this episode is not. It is not a story about someone who stopped believing in love. He believes in relationships, he wants it, and he thinks about it more than he’d admit to anyone else at that dinner table. He’s a man who sat down with the numbers, the way he sat down with every consequential decision he has ever made, and he has concluded that this particular downside cannot be insured against. Everything else in his life has a hedge, but this one doesn’t. [02:02.8]

I’m not going to tell you that he was wrong to do the math. He was not wrong to do the math. The problem is that he was working with the wrong variable, and nobody ever told him which one it was. That variable is what I want to give you in this episode.

Let me tell you what else I’m not going to do. I’m not going to tell you that the fear is silly, because it isn’t. The money is real money, right? The exposure is genuine exposure. Anyone who tells a 43 year old with assets that his caution is childish has probably never had anything big to lose. What I’m going to argue instead is that the fear is pointed at the wrong object.

He thinks he’s afraid of marriage, but he’s actually afraid of something else, and because he has the two of them mixed up in his head, he can’t act on either one. He can’t marry, and he can’t leave. He waits and waits, and the waiting costs him years that he can’t get back. [02:58.3]

So, here’s what changes by the end of this episode—the question stops being whether to marry. It becomes instead a harder question and a much more useful one. It becomes a question about a particular person and about what you would actually be joining yourself to, and about whether you can tell the difference between those two before you sign anything.

Now, I want to reiterate that the fear is earned. It’s rational. It’s reasonable. It’s legitimate. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about that fear as if it were some kind of character flaw, like they say a man who won’t commit is a man who is afraid of commitment or he’s afraid of intimacy, or he’s a man who never grew up or he’s a man who wants to keep his options open forever—and sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it isn’t.

Let’s look at what’s really at stake. Half of whatever he’s built, not half of what he’s inherited and not half of some abstract number on some statement. It’s half of the company or the business, or the portfolio that he spent a decade or more accumulating or creating, or making during the years when his friends were sleeping well and he was not sleeping. He was working. [04:08.8]

In most places and under most circumstances, that’s the math. It doesn’t matter much who wanted the marriage to end or why. The law is largely uninterested in that story. Then there’s the process itself. It’s not some bad afternoon and then a signature. It could be years, filings and disclosures, and depositions and a schedule that belongs to other people now. His lawyer will bill him for the phone calls in which the lawyer explains why the other lawyer hasn’t called back yet. He’ll spend two or three of his most productive years maybe managing a file, a folder.

Then there’s the part that people don’t put into the calculation because it doesn’t convert easily into some number. There’s a kind of specific cruelty to sitting in a room and watching something that you made get divided up by some stranger who has never been in the work, like a judge who has 40 other files that week, will simply look at the thing you gave your life to and assign it in percentages, chop it up. Whatever you thought that work meant, the courtroom has a different vocabulary for it, and then your own vocabulary doesn’t really matter. [05:15.8]

He has watched a friend go through exactly this. He has seen how it has aged him. He has heard him talk at dinner about the house in that flattened voice, and he has drawn a conclusion from it, and the conclusion is “Not me.” That conclusion is a reasonable response to the evidence. It isn’t cowardice. It isn’t a fear of commitment and it isn’t emotional immaturity, and it isn’t a fear of vulnerability.

If you brought this exact pattern of facts to him in any other part of his life, he would act on it the same way and everyone would call him prudent. A business that he watched fail in a particular manner would make him careful about that manner of business failure, and nobody would ask him what his mother did to him. [06:00.8]

So, I want to be as clear as I can—the caution is intelligent. It’s working with true information about outcomes, many of which he has personally observed. Anybody who tries to talk him out of that caution itself is asking him to be dumber than he is, and he would be right to refuse. Okay, the error is not here. The error is somewhere else. The error is in what he infers from all of that.

He takes a set of facts about how badly this can end, and he converts it into a conclusion about the institution itself, that marriage itself is the risk, that marriage itself is the exposure, that marriage is the thing to be avoided. Okay, that’s the inference, and he made it fast, and he made it maybe in the same evening that he heard about the number his friend’s lawyer quoted him. He isn’t wrong about the cost. He’s wrong about what is causing it. Everything he’s afraid of is downstream of a decision that he made long before any of that, and he has been treating that decision as if it weren’t a decision at all. [07:06.1]

So, let me show you the decision. Okay, to do that, I have to bring in some research, because on this particular question, maybe my opinion isn’t worth much, but the data is worth a great deal. Okay, so the inference that he made runs something like this: “Bad marriages are catastrophic. Whatever leads to catastrophe is the danger. Therefore, marriage itself is the danger.”

Okay, those are the premises leading to the conclusion, and for him, it happens so fast, maybe unconsciously, that it doesn’t even feel like an argument at all. It feels instead like just noticing something obvious and maybe clever, but it is not an argument. Okay, it has a step in it that does not hold.

Okay, let’s start with the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It’s the longest running study in human history. They’ve been following the same people and then their children, and then their children’s children, for more than 80 years, which means the study has outlived several of the original people who directed it. [08:07.2]

Robert Waldinger at Harvard runs it now, and what he reports about marriage is that the married participants lived longer than the unmarried ones, and the gap is not small. For the men in the study, it ran somewhere between seven and 17 extra years. For the women, it was somewhere between five and 12 more years. Let that sink in.

Now here’s another study that’s even more to the point, and it was published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine in 2021. The researchers followed close to 9,000 civil servants and municipal workers for 32 years. Okay, these weren’t people who volunteered because they were interested in their marriages. They were ordinary employees in ordinary jobs, and somewhere in the intake, the researchers asked them a simple question about how their marriage was going. [08:58.1]

Here’s what they found when they came back over three decades later. The men who had rated their marriage as unsuccessful carried a 21 percent higher risk of dying from any cause than the men who had rated theirs as very successful. This was done in the same country, same era, same kind of work, and the difference between those two groups of men was how the marriage was going, and specifically, their risk of dying from a stroke was close to double between the unsuccessful versus the very successful marriage groups.

Now let’s look at the all-cause mortality of 21% and put that into context. That same study looked at other things that raise your risk of dying. A history of smoking raised all-cause mortality by 37 percent. Never exercising at all raised it by 21 percent. So, in that population, over those 32 years, being in an unhappy marriage was at the same level as never exercising at all. Not close to it. It was level with it. [10:00.8]

Now think about how seriously you or other achievers take the exercise question. Right? He’s got a coach, or he had one, a trainer. He knows his resting heart rate and probably his VO2 max. He probably checks his HRV every morning on his WHOOP App or his Oura Ring. He listens to people talk about Zone 2, and he has probably rearranged his day or week around his Zone 2 workouts.

He has treated physical inactivity as a serious threat to his life, because it is one, and he was right to, but he has given hardly any attention to the question of who he’s going to spend the next 40 or more years with, living with, sleeping with, even though the number attached to that question is the same.

Now, these are correlations, so nobody has randomly assigned 9,000 people to either happy or unhappy marriages and then waited 32 years to see what happens. Okay, and nobody ever will. You’re not going to get anyone signing up for that, and no ethics board is going to approve it anyway, and there are other explanations sitting in the data. [11:04.7]

Healthier people might be more likely to get married in the first place. People who are easier to live with are more likely to have a spouse who rates the marriage well. Some of the longevity gap in the Harvard study is almost certainly selection rather than benefit, which is to say, the marriage didn’t make those men healthier so much as healthier men were more likely to end up married. So, I’m not going to tell you that a wedding adds years to your life, okay? That’s not the right conclusion to take away from this, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tries to do that argument through that, through the data.

The claim that I’m making is more justified and narrower than that, but it’s still enough to break this inference in half. Marital status by itself maybe predicts very little, but marital quality can predict a great deal. Okay, so this is important, because if you understand this distinction, we’re now taking the thing that the achiever has been treating as one question, and now we split it into two. [11:59.1]

Whether you’re married is a category. It goes on a form or a tax filing or something, and it changes what people ask you at weddings. As a fact about your life, it turns out to be surprisingly thin in terms of what it can tell you. But who you’re married to, and what it’s like on a random Tuesday in the fourth year of your marriage, that is not thin at all. That’s the part where the data is actually attached, which means that marriage itself is not the variable.

This guy has been running his whole calculation on a term that barely moves. The variable is the person that you’re married to. Okay, that’s where the range is. That’s where the 21% lives, and the doubling stroke risk, and getting the seven to 17 extra years.

Consider two men who are otherwise identical, same age, same assets, same friends, same, watching a divorce from across a dinner table. One marries well and one marries badly. Now, it’s tempting to say they took the same gamble and only one of them got lucky, and maybe that’s what his whole group of friends talks about as if it was just a matter of luck or a coin toss. [13:10.5]

But they didn’t take the same gamble. They ran two different experiments, and the experiments differed in the one variable that carries almost all of the effect. Calling that luck is a way of not looking at the decision, and the decision was made much earlier, and it was made by a person who could have been paying much better attention to the right variable.

So, the question is not whether to marry; the question is whether this particular person will be a full partner in the life that the two of you would build, or whether this person would be merely an accessory to a life that you’re building alone, which is like another way of saying, will this person be just a sidekick to you, or worse, a trophy? [13:55.8]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

The great philosopher Aristotle sorted human connection into three kinds. There are connections of utility, where two people are useful to each other. There are connections of pleasure, where two people enjoy each other—and there’s the complete connection, the complete kind between two people who want each other’s good for its own sake. [15:04.6]

The first two dissolve the moment the use stops or the pleasure stops, and they were always going to, because the use and the pleasure were the whole basis of the connection. Only the third type survives contact over long stretches of time. Most of what gets called romantic compatibility is a connection of pleasure with maybe a longer contract attached to it.

Now, notice what defines the third kind of connection. It isn’t what either person is getting. Tony Robbins has a line about this that I think is great, and it’s like this: “Marriage isn’t a place you go to get. It’s a place you go to give.” What makes the complete kind of connection complete is that both people are giving. Both people are giving, and they’re giving for the other person’s sake rather than for the return they’re going to get. Two givers, and that’s the whole difference. [15:58.6]

Now, let me tell you what a good partner—a partner like that that is depicted in these studies with the big differences—actually contributes, because most achiever dudes almost certainly have not thought this through or have not even realized it and certainly have never itemized it.

Okay, she gives him emotional support, as an example. She encourages him on the days that work is going badly, and there are more of those days than he tells anyone, right? And she challenges him honestly when he’s wrong or he’s not holding himself up to his potential, which matters more at 43 than it did at 30, actually, because by now most of his peers have stopped telling him.

She’s the steadiness at home. That’s the reason he can sleep deeply and the reason he took the risk at work that he still describes as his own nerve. She keeps his friendships alive by making the plans that he keeps meaning to make. She remembers his mother’s birthday. She makes sure he takes his medicine. She absorbs the mood he carries through the door on a bad day so that his kids never have to do it. [17:04.5]

The life two people build together is larger than the life he would have built alone. Okay, this is the type of partner that will actually contribute to your life in those ways that we’ve been charting out. It’s not because she’s funding it with money or a salary, or something. Now, she might be and that would be an obvious contribution, but the ones I’m pointing out are the more intangible ones, because, in fact, your partner is contributing the entire time—a good partner would be—and this is happening in a currency that never appears anywhere on the balance sheets, and most guys don’t appreciate this. They don’t even notice it. That’s the part I want you to stay with.

A good partner will not announce this. They will not sound a bugle and draw attention to it. Okay, nobody sends you an invoice. A person can receive all of this for 15 years and still describe his life as completely self-made, and in a way, he’s not lying when he says it. He means it. He simply can’t see the half of it that she has been carrying. The support is invisible, the way the floor is invisible when you take it for granted. [18:12.7]

Most men find out what she was contributing only when he’s sitting in an empty house after she’s gone. Maybe after a few months of post-divorce high, their performance at work starts to get worse. They stop sleeping well. They stop eating properly. Their friendships thin out within a year because nobody’s making the plans for him anymore, and everyone’s getting older. The mood that used to go to her at the door now falls on their children—and these guys attribute all of it to just stress, because the thing that changed was never something they appreciated while they had it, so they don’t even notice it.

This is why marital quality predicts what it predicts. That 21% isn’t produced by just having a wife. It’s produced by having a certain kind of partner. So, the point of itemizing any of this isn’t to put a price tag on her. It’s to see her while she is still in the room with you. [19:12.0]

If you are in a relationship and she is supporting you in this way, in these intangible contributions, tell her this week out loud to her face, something specific that she does that you’ve been receiving without acknowledging. Then ask yourself or her what you contribute to her life that she has maybe never itemized either, because that’s operating, too, and you might be as blind to that as she is to hers.

Here’s the other end of it. If what you have is a sidekick, okay, or a girlfriend who is a hot trophy for your insecure ego and contributes nothing else that you can point to, do not marry her—and it’s not because she’s a bad person, but it’s just because this arrangement that you’ve got right now with that person is has only one contributor to it or in it and a wedding or marriage will not produce a second contributor. It will only add a courtroom later, full of onlookers. [20:11.5]

So, if you want markers, here are five, and by the way, this is not some kind of comprehensive, complete list. It’s just five that I thought of before I hit record. Watch how she behaves when you lose money or when the work goes badly. Watch how she treats people who can’t do anything for her. Find out whether she can be told something she doesn’t want to hear and still stay in the room, stay in the conversation or the interaction.

Find out whether she has her own independent life, with her own work and her own friends, and her own opinions about things that you don’t really care about. Look for whether she has ever chosen your benefit over hers when nobody else was watching. [20:54.1]

Okay, so now run every one of those on yourself. Are you a full partner in her life, or are you a wallet with opinions? Do you encourage her when her work is going badly, or do you wait for her to finish so you can talk about yours? Have you ever chosen her benefit over yours when nobody else was watching? A lot of guys conducting this assessment would fail it. I’d want you to find that out now rather than much later.

Okay, so there’s a serious objection to everything I’ve just laid out, and I want to make it myself before you beat me to it. Okay, so this is a good one. Everything on that list, David, describes who she is now. You would be committing 50 years or more on the basis of a five-year sample, let’s say, because, look, Dave, people change. A woman you read correctly at 38 years old can be a different person at 60, but you’ll have signed the papers long before you find out. So, the test is worthless, and the caution was right all along. [21:56.8]

There’s definitely truth to this. You can’t know who she will become. Nobody has ever known that about anyone. He doesn’t even know it about himself, and he has had continuous access to himself since birth. But look at what the objection commits him to if he takes it seriously. If an unknowable future makes commitment irrational, then nobody should hire anyone, because everyone changes. All people change. Nobody should start a company with a co-founder, because people change.

He has committed decades of his life to incomplete information a dozen times over, and every one of those times he has called it judgment and he has felt good about himself for having it. He’s applying a standard to this one decision that he’s triggered by that he applies to nothing else that he does. That standard is obviously not rigor. It’s fear dressed up maybe as rigor and it has maybe fooled him for years.

Okay, then there’s a deeper mistake in this objection, which is about what you’re assessing in the first place. You’re actually not assessing a fixed set of traits, as though a person were a specification sheet that either holds up or doesn’t. You are assessing maybe character, and character is the thing that governs how a person changes. It’s the part that decides what she will do with whatever happens to her. [23:14.0]

So you’re not predicting who she will be at 60. Okay, that was never available, not even for yourself. What you’re reading is how she handles things like being wrong, how she handles being disappointed, how she handles being asked for something inconvenient at a bad time by someone who isn’t at his best—hint, hint.

Okay, those are all habits, and habits might be more durable and they might still be running when the circumstances have all been replaced. A woman who tells the truth at 38 when it costs her something is very likely going to tell the truth at 60.

There’s something else worth saying about the wish behind the objection—what he actually wants is a guarantee. He wants to be married with all the risk taken out. He wants a relationship with no uncertainty. Again, here Tony Robbins put it the most strongly. He said, “The quality of your relationship is in direct proportion to your threshold of tolerance for uncertainty.” [24:13.6]

Now, I believe your tolerance for uncertainty is one factor out of many, but it’s a very important one, and it’s necessary for a successful relationship, and a person who wants a marriage with no risk is actually wishing for a marriage where you’re not alive, because there’s no version of a good human life that arrives with all the risk removed, at least not a thriving, flourishing life. In wishing to remove all the uncertainty, he thinks he’s holding his decisions open, but he isn’t. Refusing to choose is itself a choice and it’s one that he has been making every year, and it is not the safer one.

So, let me say the practical part now, because a lot of people get squeamish here. If the answer is yes, “Yes, this is the kind of partner I have. And, yes, this is the kind of relationship I have, or I believe I have and that I want,” then marry her and protect what you built before your marriage or before you got into a relationship with her. [25:13.0]

If you have considerable assets, that means a trust of some form, put it in place early. Otherwise, it means a prenup, a prenuptial agreement drafted by a family lawyer in your own jurisdiction, because this kind of thing can vary enormously by where you live, alright, and I’m not the person to tell you how it works where you are. Talk to the legal professionals here. Do it early, this is very important, and do it in the open, and realize that this is not an insult to her. Do not treat this as some kind of insult to her.

Here’s why this isn’t the cold part, okay? Protecting what you built before their marriage is what makes it possible to marry freely. A man who hasn’t protected anything actually isn’t being generous. He’s being unclear. He’s carrying an unspoken calculation around with him, and it doesn’t go away simply because he never said it out loud. It leaks. It shows up as hesitation, and as the raise that’s coming and as the move next year, and as another Thursday where he says nothing. [26:11.5]

Clarity about property is what lets two people stop negotiating and then start being able to freely choose each other. Once the money question has an answer that both of them can look at and feel good about in daylight, then it stops sitting in the middle of the relationship, pretending like it’s not the elephant in the room between them. Then what’s left is the actual real question, which is whether these two people want to give each other their lives, and you can only answer that one honestly when it’s the only question left on the table.

Now, let me tell you what happens if he never gets to that question, because that’s the more likely outcome, alright, and it deserves to be walked through slowly. What happens is he stays single. The portfolio stays intact. The returns keep coming back in excellent, let’s say, and he was right about the returns the whole way through, let’s say. [27:04.6]

Now he’s 73. The house is very good, but very quiet, and there’s nobody in it who knows what he was afraid of at 43. Nobody ever asked, because he never gave anyone those years that it takes to earn that question. He protected everything he built, but that’s it. Those seven to 17 more years were not taken from him by some court. No judge divided them. He declined them, one ordinary Thursday at a time, and every single one of those Thursdays to him felt like prudence.

Okay, there’s a more specific version of this, and that is the woman he was seeing for two years—the one who was good to him, remember, in the story we started with? The one he liked himself when he was around her—she was the right one. She waited. She waited longer than most people would have because she could see what he was, his potential. She believed he’d arrive, but then one ordinary week, she got her act together and stopped waiting. [28:05.7]

He’ll hear about her eventually from someone at a dinner, someone in his social circle, so let me go back to that table and finish this properly. Nobody should marry to avoid being alone at night. Okay, that’s the version that produces the divorce that his friend is paying for right now, and every one of those numbers I gave you earlier comes out of marriages made that way—the unsuccessful, unhappy ones.

But marriage itself is not the trap. The trap is marrying the wrong person, because you were too afraid to wait for the right one and didn’t know what the right one was and how to know whether you are with the right one.

So, the question was never whether to marry. The question is whether the person with you is building this life with you or standing next to it while you build it alone, and whether you’re building hers, which is the half that most men never think to ask about—and that question has an answer. It’s knowable, and it’s knowable now, and you can start finding it out, this week. Go find out what yours is. [29:09.5]