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Comment by doorstar | Hacker News Reader

Kind of a strange article with the implication that we've got a wide selection of people willing to marry us and the challenge is to choose the best one.

I really only ever found one person I wanted to marry and I married them. We have similar tastes, we have similar values, and they challenge me at an intellectual level.

If the author feels like that is the wrong criteria - well I'm not sure what the alternative is. There just aren't a lot of other people I want to spend every waking day with.

> maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerge

Whatever ups and downs my marriage may or may not have, I would change nothing whatsoever when I look at the amazing children we have produced together.

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I know a couple people who won't think about people 'that way' if the person is in a stable relationship. For me it was hit-or-miss.

Do you think if you included people who were unavailable because they were taken or you were taken, would that number increase?

In the anonymity of the internet I am not going to pretend that I've never wondered about relationships with people who are unavailable, or despite my own unavailability. It is certainly possible to find people attractive whatever one's personal situation.

I still can't say I've found a better match.

Buyer's remorse is a real thing, and at some point it's far more important that you trust that you made the right choice than for some third party to approve of your decision 'objectively'.

Knowing this makes it into a kind of moral hazard to continue to press you for more information, so I will simply close with 'Congratulations'.

Statistically having minor children has been shown to make people less happy.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-having-children-make-people-...

I’ve never had to deal with raising small children - I have two stepsons for whom I’ve been their only father since they were 9-14 (now 18-23). But they were already mostly self sufficient by that time. They were at the fun age. Not the helpless baby stage where they couldn’t do anything for themselves.

The helpless baby stage is over in the blink of an eye. For me they start getting fun once they can smile and laugh, which is often in the first six months.

'Happiness' studies show up now and again and I've got to say that I've always found them suspect. The polling, the questions, the conclusions are so fungible that I find it hard to believe that there's any value in them.

Satisfaction is a more interesting measure and isn't necessarily reflected in questions of how "happy" you are. I bet a poll would find that start-up founders are less happy than people with stable jobs at large corporations. Does that prove anything about whether or not someone should do a start-up?

The entire presupposition that we're supposed to be little happiness optimizing robots always struck me as completely bonkers. I'm pretty sure it's something designed to sell more soap or greetings cards.

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