I have no comparable item by someone else to link to. So… Megan McArdle gave the following Valentine’s Day advice to women who were waiting for their boyfriend’s to propose:

So here’s my message to those ladies: It’s time to let go. I know, I know — it feels catastrophic to think about ending a relationship that you’ve already invested several years in, when what you want most in the world is for that relationship to continue until one of you gets carried out feet first. But take it from me, it will feel even more catastrophic after you’ve invested several more years. If you’re in your 30s, both of you already pretty much know who you are. And after a couple of years, you also know whether this is someone you want to spend your life with. You’re not going to get any new information by sticking around — except “My God, I wasted five years on this man.”

As you may guess from the prior paragraph, I speak from personal experience. I invested almost four years in an almost-great relationship that ended with me, shattered and tear-stained, deciding to pick up and move to Washington. You can hear all about it in this NPR segment from a few months back, which they re-aired this morning. Or you can read about it in my book, where I delve into even more of the gory details and deftly weave it together with the sad saga of GM’s decline, which happened for much the same reasons that my failed relationship did.

“Seriously?” you’re asking. “Love is like … automobile manufacturing?” Well, no. But companies are composed of people. And people tend to make the same sort of mistakes over and over. This particular mistake is so common that economists have a name for it: the sunk cost fallacy.

I have myself been on the other side of that equation. Well, sort of. Most of my college years were spent dating Julia. The end result of over four years of dating was… heartbreak. The break up came tangentially over the question of marriage. It wasn’t quite of the cloth that McArdle refers to, but it dealt with similar issues of undercommitment and overcommitment. We’d been dating for over four years and it was time to enter the next phase. This was not the result of pressure on her part, but I did feel it was imminent. Dutifully, I started making plans to propose. And it was in the process of said preparations that I started feeling an grinding sense of dread. Which was odd, because as far as I knew I wasn’t unhappy. Why would I respond this way? It turned out that the answer was that even though I was happy, I was no longer emotionally committed. She, on the other hand, very much was. That much was evident.

I didn’t quite get to pick when to pull the pin on the grenade. Julia had made a comment that all but demanded words of commitment that I simply couldn’t deliver. In retrospect, that she said what she said at all was demonstrative that she knew there was something wrong. An inadvertent admission of insecurity, which I could do nothing but verify the validity of. It didn’t end right then and there. She begged, pleaded, and sent our mutual friend Tony to try to talk me out of the insanity. Instead, Tony went back to her and reported that whether discussions were ongoing or not, the relationship was over. That was what she needed to accept it, and gave up.

It turned out to be a happier ending for her than for myself. I involved myself with someone who was everything that Julia wasn’t and in all of the wrong ways. Julia, on the other hand, was embarked on a relationship with Tony within a month.

Her relationship with Tony also lasted four years and it followed the map that McArdle lays out a little more closely. Whereas between Julia and myself, it was not realistic to expect me to propose after a couple of years (we were 20!), it was around that time when she started waiting for the wedding ring. They were cohabitating by that point, and shared a dog. Tony was long getting over a divorce from his first wife and was disillusioned about the institution of marriage. Julia had nothing to do with that failed marriage, though, and in her mind was being penalized for it. Julia started pushing, he started pushing back. And everything fell apart when it became clear that he wasn’t going to marry her and she wasn’t going to be happy with that. he was ultimately the one who left, but only because he was the one who could see with clear eyes that the problems couldn’t be reconciled.

There are more stories I could tell, mostly following the same trajectory. My brother, my best friend from childhood. Years invested, and lost in that investment. Typically, he ends it either by walking away or doing something which all but forces her to do the same. Though I know the opposite is possible and am sure it does happen, the gender roles are actually pretty constant. To avoid reducing it to “him” and “her” I’ll go with OCP and UCP for overcommitted partner and undercommitted partner.

Sometimes, it’s precisely the Moment of Truth – the contemplation of marriation – wherein the distinction between levels of commitment start becoming more apparent. The UCP will often come up with excuses (to their partner, to themselves) for their hesitance. For my brother and I, it was about saving the money for a wedding ring. For Tony, it was about “the institution of marriage” (he was remarried – to his ex-wife, no less – within six months of his split with Julia). But as you contemplate it, and as the pressure increases, it can really grind away at you. In the comfort of a stable relationship, it can be easy to put it aside indefinitely until confronted with The Question (needing to ask it).

But once the asymmetrical commitment becomes apparent, if it’s not resolved quickly, I’m not sure I have ever seen it resolved in a happy manner. Or maybe I have, but only when it’s a very specific issue that needs to be confronted (such as whether to have children, or where to live) and the OCP bites the bullet. But it’s rare, and it’s fraught with peril. But the more that has been invested, the more difficult it can be to walk away. To admit failure. To absorb the sunk costs.

Which brings me to this next video:

In one sense, the video may come across as being on the opposite side as McArdle, if it’s tackling the same subject matter at all. The video advocates commitment-caution, whereas McArdle is talking about leaving due to insufficient commitment. Where the two tie together, though, is the degree of commitment prior to marriage. Taking on costs that, later, could be sunk. Erecting barriers to exit so that in the event that the relationship is not progressing as quickly as you need it to, you become reluctant to leave. Adding to the costs, both literal and opportunity. Sometimes money, always time.

It is often perceived that premarital cohabitation is a sensible intermediate step in between light courtship and marriage, but the statistics have never really bore that out. At best, controlling for as many factors as possible, it’s pretty much a wash. For every disastrous marriage averted by discovering the problems by living together or having a joint pet or joint bank account, there seems to be another case (or more than a case) of a couple who might have rightfully broken up but don’t because they’ve slid into the lock. Cohabitation seems to work not when it is used as a filter to marriage, but when it is between a couple that has already decided to get married and/or otherwise meet the criteria for a successful marriage (not too young, upbringing, etc.) And that doesn’t really account for cases like Julia and Tony, where perhaps divorce was averted but a significant amount of time was lost.

Every couple is different, of course. As the video points out, however, we can often back into commitments we don’t realize we’re making, or thinking that we’re making prudently because it’s Still Not Marriage. It’s an inconsistent caution.

Apart from the religious aspects, the legal aspects, and the romantic aspects, the crucial role I believe that marriage can play in our lives is forcing a degree of honesty about what our intentions are. Honesty with others, and honesty with ourselves. “Will you marry me?” may sound more romantic than “Are you willing to enter a formal entanglement that will make separation more difficult?” But the question is there whether we consciously dive in with a ring and an answer, or whether we go into the pool one step at a time until we are just about as wet.

Marriage or no marriage, it’s extremely important to recognize what, specifically, you are after in a relationship. If it’s just to have fun and bide your time until later in life when you’re ready to get married, that’s cool. But if it’s marriage you have in mind, or it’s marriage that your partner has in mind, it’s quite important in my view to keep your eye on the ball. To be able to ask yourself, and them, if it’s not happening why it is not happening. In terms of commitment, there’s no substitute for marriage. And in its unwelcome absence, that empty space should be scrutinized.

“I do not agree with what you have to say, but in the event of your death for saying it, I will expend most of my energy reiterating my disagreement with you in the strongest possible terms. Racist.” -Voltaire, if alive today.

Hillary Kelly takes issue with suburbanites claiming the city as their own:

These hometown fabulists—let’s call them Faux Urbanites—defend themselves by claiming it’s easier to name the nearest big city as your hometown than to explain where exactly Strasburg, Colorado, is. Recently, an article in The Atlantic’s CityLab backed up that very argument, saying, “At simplest, it’s a matter of convenience; it can indeed be easier, and faster, to tell someone whom you assume does not know the intricacies of New England that you’re from Boston, when in fact you’re from Cumberland, Maine.” But it really isn’t that taxing to add a few short words that properly explain a town’s location. It’s just four short syllabic steps from “I’m from Los Angeles” to “I’m from a suburb of Los Angeles.” And from there, it’s just a few more words of explanation to start coloring in the details of your upbringing.

Freddie deBoer and Alan Jacobs take issue with this. Both accuse her mostly of posturing. But if one is proud of where they come from, I can see why they might be frustrated by people on the outside of it claiming the same.

The problem is that “inside” and “outside” really are not rigidly defined. Multiple people in Freddie’s commenters pointed out that Philadelphia in particular is a bad example, because many people who live in Philly proper actually live in what would be the suburbs in some other city. Colosse has little townlets right near downtown Colosse, and you can be fifteen miles away from downtown and still be in Colosse proper.

Mostly, though, the cities are organisms much larger than their flagship. Philadelphia wouldn’t be what it is without its suburbs. Those cool things that exist downtown? A lot of them exists due to a customer base that extends into New Jersey and elsewhere. Without the suburbs, Philadelphia has roughly the population of Raleigh-Durham or Virginia Beach. And Philadelphia has wide city limits and is the fifth largest municipality in the country, so it’s not even a suburb-heavy place like Seattle. People in the city talk about how the suburbanites need the urban core for jobs, but urban employers rely on an employee pool that leans heavily on the suburbs. And suburban employers rely on commuters from the city and other suburbs, and on and on.

I used to actually say “I am from Mayne” or “I am from Southfield” or “I am from half way between Colosse and Surfenberg.” But then I attended Southern Tech. I got jobs inside and outside the city limits, I lived inside and outside city limits, and the longer you are in a place, the more it genuinely blends together. Which is why New Jersey’s football teams are called New York and Santa Clara is about to get a football team that’s going to keep the San Francisco name. And why I really don’t consider it remotely dishonest to say “I was raised in Colosse.”

It seems to me that one of the most challenging aspects of running a dating site is the degree of caution people – women in particular – is the wheat-from-the-chaff problem. Namely, differentiation between losers (and worse) and non-losers, and the serious from the unserious.

This is particularly a problem on the free ones (I don’t know if they exist anymore) or those with a monthly fee where it was most economical for a guy to shoot as many messages as possible and for the women to have to wade through them. Or vice-versa, but usually not.

One of the ways around this, of course, is to charge people money. LavaLife charged you each time you reached out to somebody, which was good at making sure that I only reached out when I was genuinely interested and probably cut back on the amount of sausage-spam the ladies got.

I was on a high-end site for a year. I couldn’t believe I was spending that much money, but the barrier actually proved to be a good thing. If I was paying that much, it did signal that I wasn’t a deadbeat. And if they were paying that much to be on the site, I could be sure that every message I sent out would almost certainly be read. Indeed, I got as many reach-outs on that site as I did on any other. There weren’t a whole lot of people, but cost was its own selection mechanism.

Of course, the “not a whole lot of people” proved problematic for the business, which disappeared shortly after my subscription expired. But if I had it all to do over again (and I hopefully won’t), I would probably not be thrifty about it because cost can have its own benefit.

There is a new site called Wyldfire that seeks to filter without too-high costs. A referral system:

“We’ve discovered that when it comes to dating apps, men will go anywhere where women go, but women won’t go anywhere men go unless it’s worth their time,” says Sarah Cardey, the director of operations and marketing for Wyldfire. “But if women are the ones creating the community and are accountable for the type of people they let in, we feel like we could make a dating app women can be proud of.”

This is the guiding principle behind Wyldfire (yes, “wild” is spelled with a “y,” a la “Wyld Stallyns” from Bill and Ted), a mobile dating app set to launch early next month. Unlike Tinder and other dating apps, which have no screening processes to filter out crotch shot-requesting creepsters, Wyldfire automatically filters out weirdos by having female users select men to invite to the app (you can invite users anonymously if you so choose by sending them a “feather,” or request to join, via Facebook or e-mail).

Dating apps may or may not be a saturated market, but it’s an interesting angle.

Meanwhile, I still haven’t figured out why Facebook hasn’t created the ultimate match site yet.

I previously wrote a superficial review of Atlas Shrugged. Today, I want to talk about my emotional reaction to two scenes. There are no spoilers here beyond the first third of the book.

Early on, Taggart Transcontinental Railroad’s CEO, Jim Taggart, pulled the levers of the trade group to force a regional rival, Dan Conway, to cease operation of a superior competing line, the Phoenix-Durango. The program for Taggart was that their own line, the Rio Del Norte, had fallen into disrepair and was not ready to carry magnate Ellis Wyatt’s cargo out of Colorado. Though Conway agreed to cease operations, he declined to turn his existing lines over to Taggart.

Later on, Ellis Wyatt makes the decision to join the other Makers in Galt’s Gulch. The last straw for Wyatt is a series of regulations that were tailor designed to soak every extra bit of productivity out of him for everybody else (the “common good”). Rather than simply disappear, or take what capital he could with him, he essentially destroyed his mines in a blaze of glory.

There are similarities between the two events, in that they were both examples of successful industry injured significantly by interference in the markets by outside forces (a trade group for Conway, the government for Wyatt).

There were differences, too, that lead me to view the two cases so differently. To the point that I was happy with Conway’s decisions, and angry with Wyatt’s.

The less important difference between the two was that Conway was quite directly forced out of business. After losing his line, he had no business to operate. He could have gotten a job elsewhere, but he was displaced. For Wyatt, the expectation was that he would continue operations. He had operations to continue.

The big difference, though, was that Conway tore up the lines and sold them. That he refused to sell them to the place where they were most needed bothers me less because it’s the people who most needed it that played the central role in killing his business.

Wyatt, though, simply destroyed everything in site. He left a note saying that was basically leaving everything as he found it. I’m sure Rand saw some justice in that, and perhaps there was. I had an enormous amount of difficulty seeing anything other than needless destruction.

It’s one thing to prevent somebody from having something by keeping it or deliberately giving it to someone else. In the Trumwill Way of thinking, though, it’s another to destroy it to keep them from having it.

Most likely, though, it’s my own visceral reaction to destruction itself. Though I have defended Cash for Clunkers at Hit Coffee for not being particularly responsible for the rise in used car prices, I could only look at the whole process with dismay. I understand the environmental rationale for it, but the whole thing was dedicated to taking something useful and putting it out of the reach of the people who could actually have used it.

Presumably, like Conway’s tracks, there was a recycling and re-purposing of the metal. But there are people all across the country who could use cars in good working order, and there we were destroying them. Better that they should without than that they pollute the environment with it, while large numbers of middle class Americans got a new car at a reduced price.

Whether one considers my response to C4C to be right or wrong, I do admit that this reaction of mine does go to the almost certainly irrational. While tearing something down to build something new over it isn’t really a problem for me, I get that twinge of resistance when I see something torn down because it can’t be re-used and has been declared unsightly or (less unreasonably) a hazard. But if we’re not going to do anything with the building, it really shouldn’t matter. I just don’t seem to care.

In my own personal life, this relates to my historic inability to throw away old computers if there is even a semblance of functionality. There are very, very few uses I can imagine for a Pentium laptop, but by heavens it works so how do I throw it away or turn it into the recycler? It’s something I have struggled with enormously.

Logic did finally prevail earlier this year when I spent several hours trying to get a couple of old, single-core processor machines working. I mean, that’s not when logic prevailed. Logic prevailed when, after having done so, I realized how utterly useless these computers were and did dispose of them with prejudice.

Even then, it’s amazing how hard it is. It turns on! It works! It takes twenty minutes to open up an email but… functionality! In theory, anyway.

Presumably, had Wyatt simply left the mines in tact, the “looters” would have run it into uselessness anyway as they did with the society that they were left. In the context of the story it did make sense to hurry the process along because progress in Randverse was more-or-less predicated on the collapse of civilization. Burning the village to save in and all that.

Luke DuBois has a large number of maps comparing men and women in various respects. The first map is loneliness and last map is the Virginity Map:

The loneliness map is about what I would expect it to be. In the male-heavy west, it’s more blue. In the woman-heavy east, it’s more red. The virginity map is more interesting. Less uniformly blue than I would expect, given what a lot of people in our corner of the ‘sphere say about such things. Less uniformly red than I would have guessed, given that it’s based on self-disclosure. It’s slightly more blue than red with some blue areas most notably along the border where there are presumably young men who came over alone. North Dakota and Alaska are pretty predictable. Wyoming was quite a surprise.

The liberal and conservative one was interesting, especially given the redness of the former.

Eastern Colorado women appear to be quite open about their craziness.

The least surprising? Women using the word “happy” a lot.

I’m really surprised that people are actually putting the word “virgin” on their profiles. It’s also weird that they would put the word “lonely.”

This is all, of course, rather unscientific. Especially the self-reporting aspect. I’m also less than entirely clear about the methodology used. But hey, maps are fun.

Michael Williams observes that Putin is conquering Ukraine by referendum, then asks whether or not this could happen in the United States.

The biggest danger would be Maine, I would guess, or possibly Vermont. That would, of course, require that Canada is actively interested in expanding into the US, and that Maine or Vermont would be worth it. North Dakota for the mineral wealth, perhaps?

I think this line of questioning is backwards, though. The real question is who they United States could conquer by way of this methodology. There could be some interested Mexican states, though there aren’t any states in Mexico that I think we are itching to bring into the US.

So, I nominate British Columbia and Alberta. A couple years ago, Vancouver sought to disavow national support for the Canucks hockey team, after all. And Albert is the only state that has elected senators-in-waiting for the sole purpose of making a statement that Canada’s upper house should look more like ours. I have a better solution…

All we’d have to do is convince them! Throw in Yukon, and we are contiguous with Alaska.

FiveThirtyEight tries to define the midwest:

Indiana, Iowa and Illinois appear to be the core of the Midwest, each pulling more than 70 percent of the vote (that may partly be because of their substantial populations). Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota each pulled at least 60 percent of the vote, so we can probably put them in the Midwest without too much fuss. Ohio, Missouri and Kansas each got more than half.

As for the rest of the states, it seems unclear whether they’re in the true Midwest.

When I was young, I actually had a very different idea of what the midwest was. It included a lot of overlap with the “real” midwest, but from a different focal point. The map basically stats out in the three states and expands to varying degrees outward. Ask me to define “midwest” and you would get the central column (from North Dakota down to Kansas) and then expand eastward. I’d not have included Ohio, which as it turns out is exactly what a lot of people think of when they think of the midwest. East of Iowa, you start getting into what I mostly think of as the Great Lakes region.

Kansas gets a fair amount of inclusion in the popular mind, but in my mind it’s the first state I think of when I think of “midwest.” Not sure why. I’ve never been there.

They do the same for the south, but reach more concrete results:

While the top few Midwest states barely pulled 80 percent of the vote, nearly 90 percent of respondents identified Georgia and Alabama as Southern, and more than 80 percent placed Mississippi and Louisiana in the South. South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and North Carolina all garnered above 60 percent.

Southerners seem remarkably content to mess with Texas, giving it 57 percent support. Virginia, Arkansas and Kentucky hovered at about 50 percent.

Here, of course, we have a more immediate reference point: The Confederacy. That doesn’t explain all of the states, but you can start from there and then diminish the “southernness” of various constituent states like Texas.

I wonder the extent to which Virginia might join Maryland as a former southern state. North Carolina, too, but mostly Virginia. Or will its membership in the confederacy define it ever forward?

The only surprises to me were Florida, which I figured would be more on-par with Texas as a slightly more marginal sort of southern state, and Arkansas which I consider to be very southern. I’m also a little surprised that South Carolina wasn’t 100% because who in South Carolina doesn’t think of it as southern?

Last summer there was some back-patting in some circles when it was revealed that famously blue cities like New York and Boston have higher rates of extreme income mobility (bottom quintile to the top quintile) than red-state cities like Atlanta and Charlotte. Proof of the blue state model!

Of course, statistics are funny things. Especially when you’re looking at a nation as wildly varied as ours. Without a doubt, it reflects well on a city if poor people raised there go on to become economically successfully. On the other hand, some places are more amenable to being in the top quintile than others. For instance, if you’re born and raised in SF or NY and you are successful it’s easier to rise to the top quintile than if you’re born and raised in Atlanta or Charlotte. One big thing that Atlanta, Charlotte, San Francisco, and New York all have in common is that if you’re born there, you have little to have to leave. So the ceilings matter.

New York and Boston are not only hubs of opportunity, but if you’re successful employers have to pay you more to keep you there because it’s so darned expensive. People from these cities often get the idea that making $100,000 a year – enough to get you into the top quintile – qualifies as “middle class” because you can make that much and still not be able to afford the better things in life. This effect is limited, though, by the decreased probability of being raised in the bottom quintile since wages at the bottom tend to be (I think?) higher as well.

If you doubt the effects these sort of things have, and if saying this comes across as statistic-denialism, consider what attaching impotance to these numbers mean. Namely, that Boston are owned by many rural towns you’ve ever heard of. Los Angeles is actually less of a hub of this sort of mobility than Dillon, Montana, home of the mighty Dillon Beavers football team, a tiny state college, and not much else. Or Butte, the economically distressed city to its north that you maybe have heard of. I’m not even talking about places like West Dakota where such mobility can be easily explained.

So what’s the deal with these places? Are they that awesome? Well, the Beavers may be awesome, but by and large they are not. They do boast, unlike rural areas in the south, the ability to educate youngsters who will disproportionately go on to make good money. Which isn’t unimportant. But ultimately what they have is a lot of people who are poor on paper but due to lower costs of living aren’t poor-poor like they would be in other parts of the country. So they look disproportionately successful.

Which isn’t nothing, of course. Such places are important despite having unimpressive economic numbers generally because the “brain drain” they experience becomes a “brain gain” elsewhere (though I don’t have access to the statistics, I doubt these people are making $100,000 in Butte). It’s also a reason to be proud, just as it’s a reason for San Francisco to be proud of their ability to generate the sorts of salaries that place it so high on the hierarchy. But without a better accounting of how this statistical mobility is happening, it’s not easy to glean much more than that.

The article does investigate the average wealth of various areas if only to dismiss it. They are right that there is more to the story than that. Some have suggested that racism and segregation are the southern issue, but as the article points out mobility for southern whites is pretty low as well and Atlanta is actually less segregated than New York and Los Angeles by some measures. Race alone isn’t the issue, as the blue cities are just as multicultural as the red-state cities. Chicago, Atlanta, and Charlotte are sufficiently outside the norm that we ought to be looking at why the mobility isn’t happening. I have a feeling it’s something that’s going to be had to address on a governmental level.

-{The following was my entry into Ordinary Times’s Love Symposium. Readers here are already familiar with the music video.}-

I honestly think that the above may be the most profound love song ever written.

Some time back, a girl with green eyes and I debated the merits of God and the belief in a single, completing person out there for us. I believed in the former and she did not, while she believed in the latter while I did not. The debates felt like we were going around in circles. I would be over here, and then she would be over here, then I would be over there and then she would, depending on what we were talking about.

What she didn’t understand was how love could be real if it was actually replaceable? If there are hundreds that you could successfully partner with, were any of the partnerships really successful? Or were they just tolerable. I didn’t have great answers at the time. It was just something that was. I wasn’t looking for a prosaic partner. I was looking for a life partner. A soulmate, in a way, but a soulmate chosen and cultivated rather than one ordained by the God I believed in and she did not.

Minchin focuses on the shared experiences of love, which is a perspective that I agree with a great deal. A life with a Portuguese skier who brews her own beer is entirely theoretical. And while he can come up with a million other possibilities, in joke form or in earnest, it is his wife who he married, had a child with, and so on. It’s not inertia that keeps people together (when they stay together) but a bond that really does grow over time. The thought of dropping everything to start over with someone else seems… silly.

The larger element, however, is not about the person who made the decision to get married at all. It’s about who that person becomes.

I didn’t marry the girl with the green eyes. I married the girl with the brown ones. Without getting into too many of the details, there was a choice involved. There was a moment, and a crossroads. I knew at the time that I would be stuck with a ghost in my mind imagining how things would be going on the other road. A lifemap that the girl with the green eyes herself had me draw out, once upon a time.

As things moved along, though, the conflict in my mind faded. It faded because of time and because of distance, but also because of something else: With each passing year, I was growing into somebody different from who I was at that crossroads. As my life changed, I changed. My wife was a big part of that change because I had to step up in some places and back off in others. I had to learn to control my temper and I had to learn to be the easygoing one without sacrificing my own wants and desires. She, too, had to make changes and had to learn things about herself that she wouldn’t have if I weren’t in her life. Her priorities had to start becoming mine, and mine had to start becoming hers.

The question I wish I had been asking myself – or asking myself more directly – is whether or not I liked the person that she brought out in me and whether or not I wanted to be that person. Had I done that, the answer would have been obvious. The girl with the brown eyes inspires in me a greater degree of honesty, integrity, and patience. The girl with the green eyes fed in to my temper, insecurities, and overall anxiety. It’s not fair to mention the positives on one side and the negatives on the other as neither are the sum of how they influenced me, but they are indicative of what would have lead me to the right conclusion. I made the right choice anyway, of course, but not exactly for the right reasons.

At Leaguefest in 2012, the group of us sat in a hotel-casino and chatted. It took me a few minutes to realize something: A few years earlier, the girl with the green eyes was married in that very building. The idea of getting married in Las Vegas was never something that had great appeal to me, though had things turned out differently I could see myself coming around to it. There are a lot of things I would be doing on that other road that I haven’t done on this one. It no longer matters whether or not I would be happy on that road or not, as the guy on that road wouldn’t be me. It is cliche to say that when you love someone, and are with them long enough, that they become a part of you. But on a fundamental level, it’s true because “me” is a construct influenced by the girl with the brown eyes more with each passing day.

She isn’t unique in this regard. There was a time when the girl with the green eyes was playing a role in my formation. The girl with the hazel eyes before that. They came and went, however, while my marriage to my wife is – I hope – indefinite. While the person I would be had I chose differently is a nice-enough bloke, full of intensity, passion, and moral certitude, and though we otherwise would have a remarkable number of things in common, I have a life and self that I look forward to.