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Comment by dsugarman | Hacker News Reader

If everyone had a requirement for marriage that you marry someone as smart as you, exactly no one would be married.

I think it's implied that there is some fuzziness in the matching, not precision to the 7th decimal of some objective test or something. That said I agree it certainly isn't a requirement to be similar in specific attributes to get married. Perhaps somewhat common though.

I left it ambiguous on purpose, as equivalent could mean many things, someone at least as accomplished, at least as wealthy, or at least as considerate... the list it goes on. It all depends on what that person is looking for. Seems silly to judge which attributes are important for what is a deeply personal choice with serious life implications.

that makes sense but it still seems like there is an imbalance on expectations.

It reads as they're great and there's not a lot of people as great as they are when in reality it's probably more like the overlap between the set of people they desire and the set of people that desires them is impossibly narrow. This sounds like a tough personal problem that they can 100% work through by looking in the mirror and working on themselves.

I'm too great to ever find someone as great as me is frankly a piss poor attitude and outlook on life and I feel really bad for them to be stuck like that.

Statistically speaking, you're right, but it's still possible (especially in our brave new world) to have standards that can't suffer anymore compromise before losing the meaning of "standard" itself.

You could also simply have bad luck compounding the issue. Stuff any amount of effort or masquerade won't fix, like being a short man (inb4 "I know this small guy that...").

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