Marriage

“I've always said like, to me, the sound of a marriage that's about to end is, is like, it's a very simple, subtle sound. It's this, it's what? Huh? Yeah, whatever. Like, it's a tone of voice more than a content. And the tone of voice says everything. It's like…”

“You know, 50% or so of marriages end catastrophically, meaning they divorce. Another 10 to 20% either separate but never file for divorce, go out for milk and never come back, or they just sort of unhappily stay together and under surveys basically say, yeah, …”

“Marriage is a symbol. That's all it is. It's a symbol. We've decided we're gonna create this legal connection or spiritual connection that's gonna symbolize this way of keeping the relationship safe. It's an illusion. It's not real.”

“Marriage is the most important part of your startup. The most important thing that you do, that's your most important acquisition.”

“That's one of the reasons that the happiest marriage is one of the characteristics is that they, that the partners get more religious across the decades together. They get more religious together, right?”

“And so the things that make my wife and I happy, we like walking our dog, and we like that 10 years ago as much as we do today. And even before we had a dog, we like going for walks and doing this. We like laughing and talking about things in one. It's things …”

“I personally think marrying well is, like, the single highest leveraged decision of your entire life. And also not marrying well is also a very high leverage decision. Like, it just, it is just the force multiplier on all of your outcomes across life, and it's…”

“So I could make a pretty easy legal argument with the divorce rate about 53%. That it is definitely negligent, possibly reckless to get married.”

“But really, like, love is loaned. Like, your husband's love is loaned to you, and your love is loaned to him. It's not permanently gifted. And your marriage will end. Every marriage ends. It ends in death or divorce.”

“Infidelity is a symptom. Of the problem. The problem is almost always the same. Disconnection. Disconnection from self, and then disconnection from the other person. Because the two biggest problems are, we don't know what we want, and we don't know how to exp…”

“It's a terrible line that everybody says at the wedding, like the uncle who says it at the wedding, I should pay him a dividend. He's like, hey, he made a lot of money for me. But it really is. I mean, if anything, it should be happy spouse, happy house. But e…”

“And sex, I think, is the glue. In marriages. Otherwise just be roommates.”

“If you actually want to change the divorce rate, we have to create barriers to entry.”

“The first time most people learn what legally happened when they got married is when they're getting divorced.”

“Maybe that's the reason we're happily married, because we started to date each other after we got married. And we started to discover each other after we got married. So we had that long process of discovery. And in spite of that, we kind of liked each other, …”

“That leads to graphs like this, which show you that over time, if you are never married, and if you were married and never divorced, there is a delta of somewhere between 300,000 to a million dollars in net worth, which is kind of crazy.”

“With the divorce rate being at 40 to 50% over the last 40 years, we've really seen that this one-size-fits-all version of marriage Doesn't work for most people. So if you have a product and 50% of people are returning it, then maybe you need to rework that pro…”

“There was early data that turns out to not have been replicated very well, that men are happier when they're married than women are, that, that, that marriage is good for men, but it's not good for women. That's wrong. It's good for both.”

“What you find is that people are about half as likely to be married in their twenties. They're less likely to be cohabitating. They're less likely to be having sex. They're less likely to say they're in love than ever before.”

“When you are married, you are running a business. It is the business of running a household together, and it's only in the last hundred or so years that Americans became infatuated with this idea of love as the only reason to get married. That's ahistorical.”

“I also do not agree with the critiques that say, just get married as soon as you can. Business will follow. Get married first above all else. Make that your priority.”

“I always tell people, especially young people, the most important career decision you make is who you marry.”

“When you are married, there are three parties you need to care about, not two. It's you, your wife, and a marriage. Like, there's, like, there's three entities that you need to care about. And all of them are, need to be independently cared about. You can take…”

“Right now we have a problem where, like, marriage is on the decline because Tinder has made sex too accessible, right?”

“If you're married, you should always make it clear to people you're married, especially if you're a man, because if you're a man and you're married, you're safer in the world because men are inherently just dangerous human beings.”

“Something in the range of 80% of people say that their marriage is worse after having kids.”

“These micro moments have more of an impact on your life than that in a lot of ways. Because, you know, if I might pick the right spouse, but if I don't turn these ordinary moments into extraordinary outcomes, It doesn't matter. Like that whole choice is like a…”

“My opinion is the best financial decision you can make. Of course, this is a good decision for a lot of other reasons. But the best financial decision is marrying the right woman. Or picking the right spouse rather.”

“We've never looked for, you know, the word passionate marriage is a contradiction in terms. We've never looked for passion in the same place where we looked for security and anchoring and somebody with whom to pay the checks and fix the house. These two things…”

“As Scott will point out, the average length of time that you will work with a venture investor, eight, 10, 12 years, is longer than the average marriage.”

“When it comes to marriages according to the literature, and also from what I see, about half of the marriages are with people of the same, two people of the same personality style, and then about half are these introvert, extrovert pairings”

“I don't think it's, I mean, I don't think it's the, you know, end all be all to keep your marriage alive, I mean, you know, I think there are other ways of having great personal relationships with friends and with your kids and so on, but I think, you know, yo…”