How to Pick Your Life Partner

When we examined procrastination, we talked about how a great achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable tasks looks like from far away. In the pixel post, we looked at a human life up close and saw that it was just an ordinary Wednesday, again and again and again — and that achieving life happiness was all about learning to be happy on a routine weekday.

I think the same idea applies to marriage.

From afar, a great marriage is a sweeping love story, like a marriage in a book or a movie. And that’s a nice, poetic way to look at a marriage as a whole.

But human happiness doesn’t function in sweeping strokes, because we don’t live in broad summations — we’re stuck in the tiny unglamorous folds of the fabric of life, and that’s where our happiness is determined.

So if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small — we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.

Marriage isn’t the honeymoon in Thailand — it’s day four of vacation #56 that you take together. Marriage is not celebrating the closing of the deal on the first house — it’s having dinner in that house for the 4,386th time. And it’s certainly not Valentine’s Day.

Marriage is Forgettable Wednesday. Together.

So I’ll leave the butterflies and the kisses in the rain and the twice-a-day sex to you — you’ll work that part out I’m sure — and spend this post trying to figure out the best way to make Forgettable Wednesday as happy as possible.

To endure 20,000 days with another human being and do so happily, there are three key ingredients necessary: