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Marriage

Below are slides and a detailed summary of a talk I gave (with my wife) on “An Investor in the Marriage Market: Find Your Dream Spouse without the Drama”.  In this presentation,  I take the same standard process that works for sales, raising capital, and sourcing deals, and apply it to finding a spouse (including my wife of 23 years and 4 kids).

 

​​An Investor in the Marriage Market:
Find Your Dream Spouse Without the Drama

a systematic and efficient method to optimize yourself and find, evaluate, and sign the deal with your spouse

notes for speech delivered at National Council of Young Israel Singles Conference
November 7, 2004, Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, New York, by the Tetens. Covered in the Jewish Week.

Why are a venture capitalist /entrepreneur and a risk manager speaking jointly at a singles conference?

Three reasons:

  1. I lived on the Upper West Side, and found a woman who would marry me in just 7 months. 
  2. Since 2001 I’ve been building and leveraging technology to help investors. I run a blog on this topic, AltsTech, and also wrote a book on it.
  3. I led the first research study on how private equity and VC funds find great companies, published in Harvard Business Review, Journal of Private Equity, and Institutional Investor.

Question: The last time you were looking for a job, how many of you had an organized approach?  Sent out resumes, had a list of people to call, etc.

Question: For those people looking to get married: How many have an organized approach to finding a spouse?

Finding a spouse is similar to finding a job.  In fact, being a good spouse is a job.  It may not pay well, but has very good benefits.

While the experience of falling in love may be irrational, finding a person to fall in love with should be a rational and organized process.  No one is embarrassed to invest a lot of effort in getting and choosing appropriate job leads before we customize our resumes and apply for interviews.  There is no reason not to invest at least as much effort in finding the person. 

When starting a job many people are aware that they are likely to quit before the end of their live.  When entering matrimony very few want to think that it is not going to last until the end. So a systematic approach is all the more needed.

Caveat: this talk assumes you have decided you want to find a life partner. If that’s not your goal, you’re welcome to go on your phone.

1. PREPARE

“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

Seeking a Job

Seeking a Spouse

  • Mold yourself into the sort of spouse you want to be.  Take classes, go to the gym, improve yourself, until you are reasonably close to the sort of person you aspire to be.  You will marry someone fairly similar to yourself, so you yourself should be a highly desirable person.  Would you want your child to marry someone like you?
  • Define who you are.  Determine your elevator pitch.
  • Accustom yourself to what married life is like, e.g., live with some roommates.
  • Avoid unhealthy influences which acclimate you to being single.  E.g., unrealistically and unnaturally beautiful women/men in the media.
  • Avoid substitutes: non-serious dates, spending time with lots of single friends instead of on serious dates, watching television.

2. SOURCE

Seeking a Job

  • Pursue all legal and ethical avenues to get leads: Networking, independent consulting, writing, job boards.
  • Interview with multiple firms.  Your goal is multiple simultaneous offers.

Seeking a Spouse

  • Matchmakers, internet, speeddating, parties, even perhaps offering 10Kforawife.com.
  • Tell everyone you meet (business contacts, friends, religious leaders, other communal officials, and people with whom you go out on dates if the date itself is not successful) about yourself and what you are seeking in a spouse.  Tell the must-haves and the can’t-haves.  One friend of ours asked all her friends for the name of “just one nice guy”.
  • Provide feedback to matchmakers.
  • Rank your leads.
  • Develop a long list of potential matches.  Sort by combination of desirability plus real likelihood of marriage between you.  Of course, unlike in the job market and unlike in biblical times, I recommend serial rather than parallel dating.

3. EVALUATE/DATE

Seeking a Job

Seeking a Spouse

  • Spend time with role models: married people, not singles.
  • Interview married couples with children (including your parents) to develop a better understanding of marriage and responsibilities involved, and ask their advice on how to build a successful marriage.  Think about what parts of marriages that you observe you would like to emulate and what you would like to avoid. In particular, look at the parents of your potential spouse.
  • Research marriage and dating.  Some recommended web sites: Some recommended web sites: MarriageBuilders.com.
  • Evaluate compatibility by testing.  E.g., kindness to animals.
  • Draw up and compare personal life missions (as discussed in Stephen Covey’s books) and compare yours with a potential partner’s to make sure you are on the same wavelength—and that your missions appropriately incorporate a spouse.
  • Exhaustively review the major life questions.  Read Don’t You Dare Get Married Until You Read This!, which is a list of about 500 pre-marriage questions.  (Sample questions: How would you feel if my mother moved in with us?  What would you do if I gained 50 pounds?)  Ask those questions, either explicitly or implicitly.
  • When dating, place yourselves in diverse situations: stay up until 4:30 AM; taking care of friends’ children; going to very right-wing and very left-wing environments to assess where you and your potential future partner feel most at home; and so on.  This way you can evaluate how the other person behaves under widely varying situations.
  • Consider using a Myers-Briggs test (http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp).
  • Visualize your future. 
  • Draw up a list of the likely areas of conflict in your marriage (the “integration risk factors”).  Share them.
  • Jointly negotiate a marital agreement, i.e., who will do which chores.

4. BUILD CLOSENESS

Seeking a Job

  • Share ideas for how you will contribute to the company. 
  • Have meals together.
  • Attend internal meetings as a fly on the wall.

Seeking a Spouse

  • Spend time together.
  • Do projects together.
  • Organize an event together.
  • Learn about a University of California study on a scientifically proven method of falling in love.  And then follow that advice! Psychologist Arthur Aron conducted these experiments at UCSC:
    • The people in these experiments had been told that their lab mate was going to like them.
    • Take two people who have never met, put them in a room together for 90 minutes and instruct them to exchange intimate information, such as their most embarrassing moment and how they would feel if they lost a parent.
    • Have them stare into each other’s eyes for two minutes without talking. At intervals, bring in a researcher who says, “OK, tell the other person what you already like about him.”
    • The first two subjects got married six months later. They invited the entire research team to their wedding.

5. SEAL THE DEAL.

Seeking a Job

  • Offer handshake.

Seeking a Spouse

  • Offer the (finger) ring.  Just do it!  Propose! 

No one is perfect, including you.

Recommended Followup Reading