Last week I got married.

I met her two years ago, at one of (our mutual friend) Aella’s weird parties.

Our first date, we talked about Singapore’s child tax credits, which gave me advanced notice of where her mind was at. Our second date, we talked about category formation in borderline personality disorder, which later became this post. Our third date, we talked about why Inuit suicide rates were so high, which later became this post.

Then COVID hit. We switched our dates to a Minecraft virtual world, where we built a house together. At the time, I completely missed the kabbalistic significance of this.

I don’t usually talk about my personal life on here. But I feel like I owe you guys this one, because, well, some of you have been reading this blog a long time. And some of my earliest posts (eg) were me complaining about the dating world, and how tough it was to meet anybody or even to stay sane. And you guys were kind to me, and commiserated with me, and shared your own experiences. I feel an obligation to check in with the rest of you, to celebrate those of you who have also succeeded and empathize with those of you who haven’t yet.

Maybe I’m not a success story here, exactly. I’m getting married at 37, a lot later than I would have liked. And my story involved parts that probably don’t replicate well, like becoming a niche Internet microcelebrity whose readers sometimes invite him to things despite his many social inadequacies.

But everyone’s story is weird. During college, my father moonlighted as a juggling instructor. My mother signed up for his class, one thing led to another, and a year later they ran off to Sardinia together and got married. My best man met his wife when she dropped out of philosophy grad school to join the transhumanist compound he was staying at. Darwin spends five billion years optimizing your genes for reproduction, and God laughs and decides that whether or not you mate will depend on which weird parties you go to, or whatever.

My point is, I’m no longer a total failure at this. So as I make the sudden transition from advice-consumer to advice-dispenser, my recommendation for those of you in the same place I was ten years ago is: accrue micromarriages.

Micromarriages come from this post by Chris Olah. They’re a riff on micromorts, a one-in-a-million chance of dying. Risk analysts use micromorts to compare how dangerous different things are: scuba diving is 5 micromorts per dive; COVID is 2,500 micromorts per infection; climbing Mt. Everest is 30,000 micromorts per attempt. So by analogy, micromarriages are a one in a million chance of getting married. Maybe going to a party gets you 500 micromarriages, and signing up for a really good dating site gives you 10,000. If there’s a Mt. Everest equivalent, I don’t know about it.

Chris thinks of micromarriages as a motivational tool. If you go to a party, and you don’t meet anyone interesting there, it’s tempting to get discouraged. If you try again and again, with identical results, it’s tempting to give up. Chris says: instead, think of yourself as getting 500 micromarriages each time (or whatever you decide the real number is, with the understanding that you should update your estimate at some rate conditional on success or failure). All you need to do is go to a thousand parties and you have a 50-50 chance of meeting the right person! Maybe that number would sound more encouraging if it was lower – but it took me twenty years of trying, so I couldn’t have been getting more than a few hundred micromarriages a day, and I wasn’t slacking off.

(by the way, Chris is still looking for a partner – if you’re interested in the kind of person who would come up with this idea, check the gray box at the bottom of his post. Hopefully I can send at least a few micromarriages his way!)

Twenty years and exactly one million micromarriages later, I have yet to find any better advice. Gather your micromarriages while ye may, for time is still a-flying. Do annoying things, expect them to fail, and increment a little counter in your head each time, to prevent yourself from going insane. Then do more annoying things. Teach a juggling class. Join a weird transhumanist compound. Go to one of Aella’s weird parties. There is no royal road. I’m not claiming to have super useful advice here, just to be able to say from the end of a long and very rocky path that it does eventually pay off. Or as Lin Manuel-Mirand