Is that a request?

'k look. From about 15 to about 25 you feel everything a lot. Joy, despair, melancholy, spirituality, all of it. Your endocrine system and your neurological system are both giving you that last burst of developmental energy and it's a frickin' 5-alarm chili of hormones and bad decisions. There's lots that's great about that - but part of the downside is that seeing the abstract is a lot harder. Everything is immediate. Everything is permanent. Two points determine a line and that line stretches out to mutherfucking infinity.

This column is rankest tripe because it holds two competing notions:

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text.

AND

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel.

He only separates those two competing notions - marriage used to be for no fucking good reason at all and marriage is an impetuous fling writ large with pure conjecture about what bullshit marriage used to be so he can rant about what bullshit marriage is now.

The exercise mostly illustrates that the author has a distaste for marriage that has driven and justified his poor understanding of marriage. The facts of his argument - that marriages can be successful despite their basis in diametrically-opposed emotional states - only serve to illustrate the resilience of the human social compact.

Or, in less distancing terms, love conquers all.

I mean, look - are you really looking to get married right now? 'cuz I'll tell ya - unless you have a whole bunch of reason to stick together with Mrs. Right Now, odds are good you will both do a lot of growing in the next ten years and fuck yeah you'll likely decide that you'd be happier with someone else. Something not mentioned by the author is that from a historical perspective, "teenagers" are a radically newer invention than marriage for love. Prior to WWII the idea that an adolescent would linger around their parents' house pursuing academic education that will not directly aid them in a trade was purest aristocratic garbage. If you want to know why people are marrying later, look only as far as the delayed onset of adulthood. How do you think a 24-year-old in 1897 would take to the idea that he was somehow too immature to rent a car without his parents co-signing? He'd probably been the sole breadwinner for his household for a decade and likely had between 2 and 6 children. Nowadays she's wondering if she made the right choice about grad school. Back then the 24-year-old father-of-5 would, if he were self aware enough, be grappling with the notion that his life was mutherfucking half over instead of dreaming of a time when his car insurance rates would go down.

The author has never been married. Is he happy? I'll bet he is. I'll bet he knows he is. I'll bet he's decided that marriage isn't for him. I know a girl who got married at fifteen... in 1991. Know what? Still married. Still happy.

So. Gonna let some Swiss lordling with a title from fucking King George the Fourth tell you how to live? Your choice, you'll deserve what you get. Tom Leykis used to argue that if you hadn't married the girl within a year you never would. He's been married four times. It makes just as much sense to let a puerile shock jock rule your romantic life as it does Mr. "My $270 million Euros don't count 'cuz they're in a trust".

The way to control your happiness is to not willfully give it over to choads who pronounce dire edicts like "You will marry the wrong person." Because fuck that guy. He doesn't know you and doesn't want to. His success, however, depends on you thinking he does.

That what you were looking for?