From Nobody to Husband

The story of my own slow climb up the marriageability curve.

On my 23rd birthday, I took the last Friday bus out of the Israeli desert for a two-hour ride back to my hometown. I spent 11 hours each day of that week working a low-paying job I wasn’t good at with people who didn’t respect me. I lived in a small apartment with four cats and two roommates, one of whom¹ ate my birthday cake without permission. I hadn’t gotten laid in two years. I hadn’t been in a serious relationship in four.

Girls were not impressed that I was an expert Bloomberg user

This was the starting point for my journey up the “marriageability curve” I introduced last week. It’s the path from being a nobody (as far as the marriage market is concerned) to becoming a husband. Here’s my path.

Positive Momentum

The first part of the curve is painfully slow. It’s hard to get better at dating if no one wants to date you, and girls won’t date someone who gets no girls. But you can still be making exponential progress in the mathematical sense: compounding improvement relative to where you were last year, even if there’s little absolute improvement in your dating outcomes.

To build on steady progress, the crucial thing is to steer clear of the undertow that drags you backwards. Dejection, resentment, learned helplessness, rumination, victimhood, dating discourse. If you avoid the traps and live your own life, it will teach you the wisdom you need.

The inflection point in your journey comes when you don’t expect, usually after years of barely perceptible progress. For me, this was my 23rd birthday.

At 23, I wasn’t feeling particularly bad about my life. I was still close with friends from high school, and we were mostly going through the same flailing of young adulthood. I was finally out of the military and living on my own, which meant that I was finally free to dress how I wanted and play as much Civilization IV as I wanted. I dressed poorly, but Civ kept me from going online and falling prey to egregores. I still liked girls a lot, even if they didn’t respond to my overly sincere messages on crappy dating apps.

I was learning how to be an adult — taking care of my basic needs, showing up professionally, socializing with people I wouldn’t naturally be friends with. I signed up for the GMAT on a whim and studied every day during dead hours at work. While much of my day-to-day was a bummer, my overarching life mood was one of indefinite optimism.

Two months after my 23rd birthday, I took the GMAT and scored in the 99.5th percentile. My optimism suddenly became a lot more definite. My job became a placeholder as I worked on business school applications. My material conditions stopped being a reflection of my worth, just a temporary circumstance.

In July, I got an email from a Russian acquaintance I met on Birthright during my service. She was in Israel with a friend named Natasha, did I want to meet up? The answer was no, it’s 100 degrees outside and the World Cup is on. But I owed her for entertaining me in Moscow when I visited. I turned the football off, texted a few friends to meet us at the beach, and got on the bus.

This photo was taken that night. I’m in the corner, my hand resting awkwardly on the shoulder of a classmate I’ve been fruitlessly pursuing for years. Natasha is in the back, ignored.

But over the next week, she and I got a few occasions to hang out. We talked about Siberia, mathematics, and the desire to escape and start fresh. I wasn’t trying to flirt or even impress her, since Natasha lived 1600 miles away in a country I was never going back to. The evening before her flight, I invited her to sleep over at my parents’ place. We ended up talking all night. At 5 am, I drove her to the airport, got out of the car, and finally realized that we’re both hopelessly infatuated. We kissed and she flew off.