The article equivocates between marriage as legal privileges, marriage as lifelong monogamous commitment, marriage as cultural ideal, and marriage as signaling mechanism about relationship seriousness.

Yes, this is par for the course for the "Case Against X" template -- shift seamlessly between different meanings of the word X, because the whole point is it's a polemic and not a careful argument. But it's still frustrating and sloppy thinking.

Second-time-arounders who take their time and spend several years with their partners before marrying again tend to choose more wisely.

My first marriage: 16 and a half years. My (2nd) wife's first marriage: 18 and a half years. Our partnership: Four years as de-facto partners, 28 years married. 32 years together so far.

Big lesson from first marriage: When you "win", you lose. My first wife and I were always arguing and fighting. My second wife and I have never argued. We both refuse to fight. (We've had some terse words, but never a fight.) We agree on so many things that nothing else is important enough to lose angst over.

Yes, you can break the chain, but not necessarily quickly enough to save yourself. A "successful" divorce requires a certain level of decency on both sides, and you won't truly know whether that's there until it's too late.

I hope for the best when people marry, but I also know a part of just how bad a bad case can be. And reading personal accounts on the Internet (and in the press), I'm aware that my experience is far from the worst.

My wife and I do everything together, including late night code sprints.

Find a best friend and marry them when you have that feeling you had as a kid when you had to go home after a sleep over. Everyday feels like a sleepover.

I'm a workaholic, but I work from home right beside my wife so we can still chat and hang out.

Debatable if all that is true, but it does seem like the increasing atomization of society affects the nature of marriage.

How many men like to write code, and how many women do?

And even more unfortunately, your perfect mate can turn into an evil menace right before your eyes. Been there.

I disagree. My wife and I got married the year we met, engaged the first month we met.

We had an instant connection of lust and similar interests. After two dates, I invited her to go overseas w/ me for two months. We knew we'd either hate or love each other by the end of it. It took 1 week for us to realize we were deeply in love. We got engaged 2 weeks later and married the same year.

This was all after I had given up on finding anyone. You need to get to know yourself and what you want, then find someone that wants the same things. Straight up talk to them about the important things the first date.

The important points for us were the things that had caused past relationship issues. Weed friendly, really sexual, introverted, dark humor, knows depression, same political belief, same religious belief. Yes it's good to be able to compromise, but ideally you don't want to.

> And even more unfortunately, your perfect mate can turn into an evil menace right before your eyes. Been there.

We know that neither of us could take that. We would kill ourselves if we didn't have each other, so propping each other up is actually propping ourselves up.

Some might call that an unhealthy dependence, I call it being soulmates.

Well...yeah. Don't get married until you've been together for several years, so you have some track record to know if they're the right person.

Do you like to gamble? Marriage is a gamble.