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My name is Joshua Sheets. I am your host. And on today's episode of the podcast, I want to share with you a fairly comprehensive outline of how to find and attract a very high quality spouse. That is my goal, to give you a formula, a list of things that you can do that will help you to attract and find, find and attract, let's get it in the right order, find and attract a high quality spouse.

Now you might be quickly hastening to say, Joshua, but Joshua, this show is called Radical Personal Finance. What does this have to do with personal finance? And my answer here as I begin is quite a lot, quite a lot. Now I could take, if I were more courageous, I could take the track to say that one of the best and most reliable pathways to your wealth and financial independence is to find and marry a rich person.

I would like to do that show because it's certainly something that people talk about. We know that it's true. We know that some people do find and find love and marry for money. And tell you what, there's a lot of thing that seems really attractive to it, of finding somebody rich and marrying that person.

I'm not quite courageous enough to tackle that subject. I'll let you do that, simply because I don't consider that to be an ideal soul quality to judge someone by and I don't necessarily know how to do it. I don't know how to go out into the world and attract and find, you know, a rich heiress of some kind who can support me in my lifestyle.

I've known a couple of men who have done this. Being from Palm Beach, Florida, I have known a couple of men who, a friend of mine who ran a stationary shop had married a very wealthy lady and he ran the shop, could give him something to do but she supported him and did really well.

But my reticence just comes down to being a man and I would have a hard time respecting myself of going after that. I think there's a difference between men and women in this regard where finding and marrying a rich man seems to be a little easier for women to accomplish in some cases than it is for men.

I think the kind of man who's going out looking for a rich woman is often not very attractive to the rich woman in question. So I'll let someone with more courage than me tackle that. On a more mundane level though, I want to tell you why this is a financial topic and there are two things related to it.

Number one, on its face, it's obvious that your marriage decisions will impact all of your financial planning. We know that the amount of income that you earn, the amount of wealth that you accumulate, the specific expenses and obligations that you have throughout your lifetime, all of these are going to be affected by your decision to marry or not marry.

We know that on the positive side, marriage is a very good indicator that is reliably going to be one of the factors that means you're likely to wind up in the top cohort of your peers in terms of wealth accumulation, income, all of the financial statistics are very strongly in favor of those who marry.

On the contrary, we know that those who divorce often experience an enormous financial destruction and it's one of the biggest risks that you can face in your life and so it's certainly one of those things that matters. The reason I like to talk about it and want to talk about it is that I always have an interest of going basically a level back, going a step upstream and that's how I think about a topic like this.

I want you to pretend for a moment that you were part – you grew up in a tribe of Indians in the Amazon somewhere and you have zero contact with the modern world, you're living out in a rural environment and you decide for some reason to take up an interest in personal finance.

Well, the first thing that would happen would be you would simply have to figure out some reason to take an interest in personal finance because in a primitive setting like that, the whole concept of finance and money and everything like that is just not applicable. It's only applicable in the modern world.

So let's pretend that you were going to take good financial advice. Well, the first thing that you would do would be to start to engage in the modern world. You wouldn't engage in the modern world at the level of saving money into a retirement account or lowering your tax bill.

You would engage in the modern world on the level of learning how to earn money, learning how to earn income for wages, learning how to spend money. But if we take it a step back further, we can see that behind all of these decisions there's always one more level, one more level, one more level, one more level.

And so if we look at somebody who is, let's say, a stereotypical aristocrat born and raised with a silver spoon in his mouth, and we go back to the very beginning, what we'll see is that there are so many levels that ultimately produce that aristocrat that if we plumb the depths of those we can learn from them.

We can go all the way back to the foundation of a civilization. We can go – and what I'm saying here is we can go back before genetic seed, right? The topic of genetics is an important component of personal finance because we are all a basic product of our genes.

And so the ability that our parents had to find and attract one another and produce intelligent and handsome children is a fundamental aspect of our long-term financial success. We can even go back to the society, the society that is stable and holds us. And so my point is that when we talk about finance, if we exclusively restrict our conversation to those things that are covered on the CFP exam, we can approach one level of success.

But for everything that is covered on the CFP exam, if you go back one more level, you can often find a factor that, if it's optimized, can sweep everything else away. Again, the example I always like to use is simply you can practice frugal living and savings and good investing over time, but if you just have an enormous income or build an enormous business, then all of the need for the day-to-day penny-pinching stuff goes out the window.

So it would behoove us to spend time focusing on the things that are one level up. And today's podcast is one of those things. And so I believe that this is a financial topic, and that's why I want to present it to you in the context of radical personal finance, because it's one of those foundational topics that most people don't cover.

But if you get this right, it can go really well. Back to the marrying a rich spouse is simply that my wife got it right. She married me, and I've paid every bill, and she's had as much money as she needed ever since that time. And so her pathway to financial independence, in her case, depended very much on her getting the marriage thing right.

And we didn't have an easy road into marriage, but once we got on that road, then everything worked out well enough for her, at least so far. Now, that's not to say that things couldn't go wrong in the future. We have to protect against that. That's why we talk about life insurance and health insurance and proper divorce planning and all the stuff that goes with everything, so that it continues to go right with her.

But that these concepts and what I'm going to share is fundamentally important. And so if you want to marry rich, you want to marry a rich man or a rich woman, I'm going to describe to you in this podcast a formula as to how you can accomplish that and get you on the road to that if that's something that you are interested in.

If you are just interested in marrying somebody who has other qualities that you admire, I'm going to give you a formula in today's podcast to help you accomplish those personal goals. Before I get to that formula, I want to also give one quick apologetic for marriage. There are two basic decisions that shape the actual experience you have of life over the long term.

Decisions to marry or not marry and decisions to have children or not have children are two of those basic decisions. There are a couple others, but those are two fundamental decisions. Now separately in other episodes of the podcast, I've talked about the decision to have children. I've tried to make an apologetic for that most people should consider having children.

I want to make a quick apologetic here for marriage. And I want to talk about why I feel such a burden to share this formula and help you. It has to do with, frankly, the success of our culture on a broad macro level all the way down to a personal level, the just simple happiness that you and I will experience by being well-partnered in life.

Historically all successful and enduring societies have built some kind of social construct that naturally funneled most young people into marriage and procreation, family growth. If a society is not able to accomplish that, it will fail in the fullness of time. Every society that is not able to create a stable population that stabilizes the needs and the desires of young men and women ultimately falls to some influence.

You oftentimes, for example, if you have a polygamous society, you'll often have so much unrest by the unwed men in society who aren't able to compete with the high value men who take all the wives that results in social decay over time. You have societies in which there's men and women are kept separate, just they collapse over time.

And then ultimately if a society doesn't have children, doesn't maintain high birth rates, it gets subsumed by some other society that does. So our society, the one that you and I live in, also previously had such a social construct that naturally funneled most young people into marriage and family growth.

But speaking broadly of Western civilization, U.S. American culture that I come from, and perhaps the various subcultures and microcultures that I represent and you represent to some degree, our society once did that, but that's broadly collapsed. We have replaced the shaping power of marriage as an institution that forms people with the false belief that only perfect and perfectly self-actualized human beings should marry.

We have replaced raising children as a natural and normal life goal with alternative goals, such as making money and retiring early as the primary life goals to pursue. So if you and I desire for our families, our cultures, and our societies to continue and to flourish, we have to change some of these problems.

And because this is all upstream of finance, if we don't get it right, our financial lives are much, much more difficult. If we live in a society of increased cultural conflict due to poorly partnered men and women, if we live in a society that is old, growing older, graying, even all of our welfare programs fall apart, our social security and other government benefits that would see to us in our old age, these are all predicated upon a young and growing society.

And so we would have much bigger problems. And so we want to talk about this stuff and we want to deal with it straight on. And we want to focus on dealing with it straight on so that we can develop strategies to help ourselves and also our children so that our society becomes one that is expanding and growing and spreading out and subsuming other inferior cultures in the fullness of time.

The decision to marry is largely based upon your meeting an acceptable marriage partner at an appropriate phase of life and then being able to successfully attract and woo that person into a committed marriage with you. I think the default natural evidence-based desire or decision for most people should be to marry.

That should be the default choice. And we should not shy away from installing that default choice, that default ambition into our children, into our neighbors, into our society around. We know that all of the sociological data that we have shows that whether by objective metrics such as health, health span, life span, or subjective metrics such as self-reported happiness and satisfaction with life or various other self-reported metrics, that married people outperform unmarried people on, I want to say all, I'd say most because I haven't seen all, all the ones that I've ever seen.

I don't know of a metric that married people don't outperform unmarried people on. Now we obviously need to think carefully about survivorship bias because divorced people, especially recently divorced people, tend to have a very low opinion of marriage. And they want to contradict all of the data and statistics that I have just said.

Although their opinion of marriage somehow tends to change over time. I've lived long enough now to work with and talk with a number of people who have gotten married then gotten divorced and there's a remarkable chain of events that tends to happen. Within the months and sometimes years immediately after divorce, you'll hear people swear by everything that is dear to them that they will never ever again marry.

And then something happens sometime later. Usually they meet a certain someone or a certain series of someones and they kind of soften up and then all of a sudden they're married again and they're proclaiming the benefits of their best decision ever. There are some who go the other way and follow through on that long-term vow not to marry, but there are few and far in between.

And so we should be careful here. Obviously I don't want to deal flippantly with any of these things. These are important. But our bias should be that all of the evidence is that most people should marry. And that, again, the metrics that we can measure indicate that they're better off in the fullness of time.

And we shouldn't be ashamed to study those metrics, learn from them, and then share them with others. Because even when talking about divorce and its damaging effects, what I'm talking about in this podcast is going to be fundamental to avoiding that. Divorce does not happen accidentally or randomly. It's not randomly distributed.

There's an effect that comes from certain causes. And while not all causes of divorce can be avoided for all people, many or at least I would say most or at least many of them can be avoided by better attention to the formula that I'm going to give you here in this podcast.

We know that other lifestyles really don't work in the long term. For example, singleness, or let's just start with celibacy, single celibacy is not a long-term winner for most people just due to their basic biological urges. There are some people who have been able to master those urges, but in general long-term celibacy is not a lifestyle that most people have pursued voluntarily.

We know that promiscuous sexual behavior outside of marriage is empty and/or hollow for most normal people after some amount of time. Sometimes it's empty and hollow very quickly. Some people go on for a decade living a promiscuous lifestyle of fornication and then they realize that that really wasn't a big winner and they ultimately change and walk away from that.

There are some people who don't. Our society is full of psychopaths and sociopaths and perverts and we can go through the names of P. Diddy in the news right now or Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey or Oscar Wilde or Marquis de Sade or all of these perverts that throughout history have been around.

We know that sociopaths and psychopaths will continue in their destructive behavior and we have to restrain them as a society. But generally speaking, most arrangements other than one man, one woman marriage don't work in the long term. So it's better for us to give attention to what we know does work effectively, what should be the default option for people, to teach our young people that this should be the default option because we know that it's the best default option and then try to solve the issues that arise from that.

So rather than sacrificing a generation to wander around with a lifelong pursuit of self-actualization and arrive at the end of life wondering if it was worth it, since we can measure that stuff pretty effectively, we should focus more on solving the problems with marriage itself and then our next generation will be in a stronger place.

And so how do we solve some of the issues with marriage? Well some of them ultimately are legal and there's many layers that some are cultural, some are social, but at its core we have the best chance of solving the problems that are closest to us. And I think there are a couple that I want to really focus on.

First we diligently prepare people for marriage, especially by making sure that individuals have a good exposure to the world, a good sense of who they are and what they're looking for in life. And then we give individuals, unmarried individuals, the tools to attract a high-quality spouse so that they would have the best possible chance of building an enduring and high-quality marriage relationship.

So I'd like to talk about how do we prepare young people for marriage. Because if you start doing what I'm doing and you talk about what I'm about to do, you speak about marriage while young, you will quickly hear and receive a well-intended, well-meaning objection. Someone will say, "We don't want people to get married too young.

After all, young people don't even know themselves or they haven't even had a chance to get to know the world in some way. Marrying too young is a problem." And I'm inclined myself to agree with this objection. I don't want to encourage marriage that is too young. But before I agree with the objection, let me point out the hypocrisy of this objection in our current moment.

In most of our societies, we have decided to treat 18-year-old men and 18-year-old women as competent humans. We consider them competent to cast a vote in a democratic election. We consider them competent to go to war and die, either voluntarily or involuntarily. We consider them competent to get tattoos, to go through a sex change surgery, to commit crimes and be held fully responsible for their actions and the results of their actions.

We consider them competent to get themselves euthanized in some countries. And we consider them competent to marry. Now, of that list of things, and you could expand the list into many other things, but of that list, marriage, in my judgment, is probably the least harmful possible decision of any of those things.

Now, the tattooed among us would argue with that and the voters would argue with that, but I think you could extrapolate out and say, "Well, is it really harmless to have a bunch of 18-year-olds voting when they're so easily swayed by whatever?" I don't know. The point is that marriage is a relatively – we know that the long-term outcome of marriage is a relatively positive and strong.

And so, basically what I'm saying is that if we're going to automatically have the response that 18-year-olds shouldn't marry, then they definitely shouldn't do any of the other stuff on that list as well. Now, we know from the data that, at least in our current paradigm, that there's a higher rate of divorce for people who marry at 18 as compared to people who marry at 25.

I don't know why that is the case, but I would say that that's why I'm inclined to agree with the objection. I'm not trying to get my own children to marry at 18. But I think that we can do a lot more in the direction of solving this. First, some of those other things, those other decisions, should be deferred beyond the age of 18.

If I understand from the medical personnel among us, they say that people's brains – that people don't even fully mature from an intellectual or mental standpoint until at least mid-20s. And so, I'd like to tell young people, I tell my own children, that if you're going to engage in some life-altering decision or behavior, it's probably best to wait until you're something like 30.

You want to get a tattoo? Get a tattoo. But just wait until you're about 30. People I've noticed who are happiest with their tattoos are the ones who started when they were fully formed adults, not the ones who went out and impetuously made a decision when they were as young as possible.

I tell my children, if you want to consume alcohol, that's fine. Just probably wait until you're 30. You make smarter decisions. If your decisions are not encumbered by your inebriation, just wait. Wait until you can make more mature, intelligent decisions. And so, most things in life are better off to defer until a later time.

And we could argue that that's the case for marriage. Now, the problem with marriage is that there are certain periods of life in which certain things happen better. And I frequently talk about money-bound goals and time-bound goals. And with marriage, and especially with procreation, younger tends to have better long-term outcomes.

If you wait until you're 30 to marry, you can still marry well, and you can have children potentially. But the statistical likelihood of your marrying your dream partner and/or your having children is much, much lower. It's much more likely that most of the dream spouses that you would have loved to be married to are long gone by the age of 30.

And if you're going to have children, if you start having children at 30 and later, when your brain is fully matured and fully formed, then you are going to, number one, not have as much time with those children as you otherwise might have. Number two, you are probably going to have a more difficult time conceiving and birthing those children than you otherwise would have.

And number three, you probably won't be able to have enough time to have as many children as you otherwise would have. And so marriage is one of those decisions in where, because we have a biological component of the effect of marriage, we want to be thoughtful about arbitrarily setting a certain age.

And so one of my questions is, how much of this kind of preparation for marriage is cultural as compared to biological? I will concede the point that perhaps 18-year-olds are better off having more time for their brains to develop and for them to grow. But I also think that we can affect some of these things from a cultural perspective.

Why aren't our 18-year-olds prepared generally for marriage? Why would you and I shudder if most 17 or 18 or 19-year-old young men and women came to us and said, "All right, I'm engaged." And we say, "Is that really a good idea? Why would both you and I do that?" And could we do a better job of preparing our young people effectively for marriage?

I think that cultures throughout history have done so. So why can't we, or at least why couldn't we if we wanted to? Is it the fact that there's some magical age, for example, is 25 the magical age at which it makes sense to marry because then you're going to have the statistically lowest chance of divorce, or is it just that our culture has accomplished certain things that happen by and around the age of 25 that winds up in that being a good solution?

So I think a good amount of this is a cultural phenomenon. And so we could change our culture either on a micro level, our family culture, or on a macro level if we wanted to. So reasons not to marry young, I've already mentioned maturity, emotional and psychological maturity. Certainly, some expressions of maturity are biological, but not all.

It's not uncommon for you to encounter a 30 or 40-year-old who, though his chronological age has advanced, his psychological and emotional maturity seems stunted for various reasons. Sometimes there's been some kind of trauma that has stopped the maturing process. Sometimes it's just disuse, nobody was forced to mature. And so I think that we could encourage our young people to stronger emotional and psychological maturity before their biological age would indicate that it's possible.

What about financial stability? One of the great problems of marrying at 18 would be that very rarely would a young man or a young woman have any measurable financial stability. But that's something that we've done. We've created that system by freezing young people out of the job market, freezing young people, making it illegal for them to work in many cultures prior to that certain age.

We've created cultures that are very sophisticated and require advanced levels of education and skills and training before someone can be productive. And so we could go back and think through the educational process that we use and help people to be more prepared at a younger age. Youngers can earn money even in a complex society just like anyone else can.

Or education and career development, our training and educational processes could be adjusted if we wanted to. What about life experience? I think one of the most powerful ones for many people is just to say that at 18 you don't know yourself because you've had a very constrained life experience.

A natural way that many people would grow up would be to live in one town where their families from, have one life experience of going through a local school system, and their only experience of life comes from what they've learned from vicariously through textbooks or reading or movies or some other thing like that.

And so the young individual will turn 18 years old, go off to college, and it's basically the first time that that young man or woman has experienced freedom and independence, the ability to choose who he or she socializes with and interacts with, and you start to say yes to different kinds of life experience and no to other things.

And it's that process of gaining exposure to varied experiences that often help a young man or woman to form his or her perspectives on life and help him to be more confident in what he likes and what she's not into. But why does that life experience have to begin at 18?

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And so this is why I travel and why we try to read very broadly and why we try to interact with different cultures and different people and have different situations. And then even that experience of going off at 18, I don't think that that should be the first time that young men and women experience freedom and voluntary association.

I think it's smart for high schoolers to study abroad in high school rather than just waiting until 18. I think that teenagers should go and spend their summers working at jobs where they're not at home so they experience the maturing effects and all of the things that come. It shouldn't be delayed until 18.

I think that if we do a better job of exposing our young people to diversity of experience and diversity of philosophy, then there's probably a stronger possibility that an 18 or 20-year-old would feel confident that, "I know who I am. I know what I want. I know what I want to do," and be more ready and more mature with a varied life experience to move into marriage.

And so there are other factors we could go on. My point was just to pique your interest and to say, if you don't believe that 18-year-olds should marry, why don't you believe they should marry? And take those factors and say, "Are these things that are biological realities that are unalterable, or are these factors things that could be changed if we molded and adapted and reshaped our cultures in some way?" And my answer is that there are a few of those things that fall into Category A, and some also.

I don't want to create a counterculture that is forced—certainly not one that's forcing—but I don't want to create a culture that's just mindlessly sweeping young men and women into marriage as young as possible, but I want to work hard to create a culture in which there are easy pathways for young men and women to marry when they are young.

Why is youth such an important component? Why do I care about when young? In addition to all of the factors that I've alluded to and mentioned—things that marriage is a transforming influence on young men and people, it has an amazing maturing influence, that when you marry young you have more time with your marriage partner, with your spouse, you have more time with your children, everything—when you're younger it's easier to couple up because you're more malleable, you have that less life experience—has a converse benefit in that you can adapt yourself to your spouse in a way that's much harder if you come together when you're both fully formed, mature adults at 32 years old, and you're set in your ways.

It's easier to be malleable, and that can form a stronger bond. And then everything related to children, childbirth, and time with children, all of those things matter. But the reason I want to emphasize this in today's episode has more to do with your ability to find and attract the highest quality spouse, and this is why this is applicable for those of us who are raising children to be thinking about, and it's applicable if you're listening to me and you're 20 years old or 30 years old, 40 years old, 70 years old, and you're unmarried and you're trying to think about, "How do I go about this?

I'd like to change this. What do I need to do?" So the key point is simply, the younger you are when you decide to pursue marriage, the better the potential outcome because you have the widest possible pool of high-quality potential mates. When you are young, you have the widest pool of high-quality potential spouses that you will ever, ever have, and I would submit to you that this is a mathematical fact.

Let me demonstrate it to you. Let's assume that you are a young man or young woman and you have a sample set of 100 potential spouses that are available to you, that you're exposed to. These could be the girls that are in your high school or the boys that are in your college or the co-workers you have or the people you meet at the tennis club or whatever you do or the matches that you get on whatever app you're swiping on at the moment.

So you have a sample set of 100 persons. Not all 100 of these individuals are equally appealing to you, and so we could create a grading system of some kind for these individuals. We could choose and create our grading system for simplicity on a scale of 1 to 10.

Now let me hasten to add that this is your grading system. I'm not saying that, for example, the way this, you know, she's a 10 is commonly used as based upon looks or he's an 8.5. This has become somewhat vulgar because I think the factors that people are often using in the grading system are not very well thought out, but the reality is we all have a grading system.

We all have some kind of system that we grade other people on. Whether it's explicitly expressed and we could actually point to it, write it down on a sheet of paper, plug it in a spreadsheet and rate our potential candidates based upon each of the factors that are involved or whether it's just an implicit unexamined attractiveness scale that I'm generally attracted to this person.

We all have a grading scale, and I think that's a good thing. If you go through your grading scale and you divide these 100 potential spouses into 10 different categories, you would probably get, at the outcome of your grading, you would probably get something like a bell curve. And so if we applied the standard numbers to kind of a standard bell curve to this group of 100 individuals that you know, again, think of the 100 girls you graduated with from high school or college or the last 100 matches you've matched with on your social media app, then of that, at either extreme, you would have a small number.

Let's say you would have—I'll give you the numbers. So on your scale of 1 to 10, you would have 2 people who are rated as 1, very undesirable. You would have 5 people that you would rate as a 2. You would have 9 people that you would rate as a 3.

You would have 14 people that you would rate as a 4, 20 people you would rate as a 5, 20 that you would rate as a 6, 14 as a 7, 9 as an 8, 5 as a 9, and on the very high end of the most attractive desirable people for you, there would be two 10s in that sample set of 100 people.

Now you have that sample set of 100 people. Fast forward one year. Of that 100 people, at the end of one year, there will be fewer available spouses to you of that sample set of 100 people than there were one year before. Why? Well, some people will die perhaps, not many if you're very young, more if you're older, but maybe one would die.

Some people will marry, and this would be the most frequent category as to why someone would no longer be available to you as a potential spouse. Some people would just simply age out, that some people might get too old or too young. You would age out. You would get older and you would say, "It's not appropriate now for me to be interested in someone who was 13 years younger than me or 14 years older than me." Time and life decisions are going to naturally cause many of those 100 people to be unavailable to you.

Now here's my question. Of the people, let's say that in a given year, let's say 20 of the 100 people naturally are no longer part of your available sample set. Are those 20 likely to come from the top half of the curve, the fives and ups, or from the bottom half of the curve, the lower than fives?

I would say that since the biggest factor in people not being part of your 100-person sample set is likely to be that those people are married or in a committed relationship leading to marriage or something related to that, that they're probably going to be coming from the most desirable candidates, the fives and over.

Every year what's happening is the best candidates for marriage are quickly becoming fewer and fewer. That doesn't necessarily mean that the most beautiful women are no longer available or the most attractive men are no longer available. Remember, these are your figures, these are your ratings levels, but the best candidates for marriage, if you're interested in marriage, are continually being taken by other people who are able to attract those people into a marriage relationship.

If you're not paying attention to this, it's very easy for you to wind up in an unintended place. It's very easy for you to wind up older than you ever intended to be and with many fewer marriage candidates. You're looking around at the available guys and you're just thinking, "Ah, these guys are all losers." You're looking around at all the girls and you're thinking, "Ah, I don't want to marry these girls," and this is a natural, normal part of life.

Now, the answer to this is be as aggressive as possible at a young age about being prepared for marriage and pursue it as a focused goal. We can't predict exactly when you will meet someone that is an ideal fit for you, but if you are open to meeting that person when you are younger and if you've been intentional about preparing yourself to be able to attract that person when younger, everything will work out.

When you are young, you have the most possible people that you will ever have. Now, I've talked about the first thing about population, the potential candidate pool of unmarried individuals that you could potentially attract into a marriage relationship being small, but there are other things as well. Every year that you get older, you might face challenges in being able to attract a partner that's of your ideal age and this affects men and women differently.

The traditional normal marriage contract between men and women recognizes a frustrating reality. Generally speaking, women are the most attractive marriage candidates when they are very young because women who are young have the maximum peak of their physical beauty and attractiveness and alluring qualities and they have the maximum ability to have babies when young.

As a woman gets older, her physical beauty generally declines and her ability to have babies generally declines. Now for men who are younger, their opportunity and ability to provide a warm and comfortable home and provide financially and provide emotional stability and be good fathers, generally when a man is young, that ability is only in its infancy.

Twenty-year-old guys are not generally becoming multimillionaires and having all the money to support their wife in FERS and Mercedes and in luxury. As a man gets older, his ability to provide those things generally increases and so he's in his 40s and 50s, it is in his max earning years and he's able to provide those comforts of home.

And so the normal history of the marriage contract that is one man, one woman for life has been wife comes to the table and says, "I will give you my youth, my beauty and my childbearing ability and child raising ability. I'll give you these most valuable decades of my life in exchange for you giving me the comfort and security and stability during the time when you are the most attractive and I'll invest in you when you're young and not particularly attractive so that you stay invested in me when you are older." Well in the marriage environment we've created today in which the marriage contract has been weakened and destroyed legally by no fault divorce and culturally with basically saying it's no big deal, this has turned into a really bad system for women and for men because women don't have the enduring confidence in the marriage relationship and men after now a lot of that and decades of that, men are now realizing, "Wait a second, I can go out and I can attract multiple women who are young and beautiful and raise children for me." And this is an immoral system that we have to end and it's a very frustrating system and it can be frustrating for both people.

The example I think of is there was a friend of mine when I was in school who was incredibly beautiful. She was a beautiful girl. She was physically beautiful, she had a lovely personality, she was very athletic, total class A model, wonderful girl. When we were in school, my friends and I, those of us who came from a school where we had a peer group, I remember talking with a friend of mine about what she was doing.

She was in college and she was dating professional athletes. She was dating professional athletes who were current professional athletes who were showering her with money and experiences and everything in the world. And I remember thinking at the time, "How on earth could I compete with a professional athlete for this beautiful girl, this amazingly attractive young lady?

How could I? What could I offer her? I couldn't offer her anything. I was a broke student and, you know, maybe I could have prospects but not the kind of prospects that a professional athlete had and I just thought, "Well, she's just totally out of my league. There's nothing that I could offer her." But what's interesting is fast forward to today, that girl is now a middle-aged woman and she's a single mother and when I look at her now, I don't have anything near of that feeling that I once had of inferiority to her because now as a man, I am coming into my prime in many respects of my life and now I feel like I have a lot to offer.

But now the question would be if I weren't married, well, would she be the one that I would pursue and that's the question that a lot of men face and it's a very frustrating problem for men and women. And so the best solution to this is to try to be married to somebody who is close in age to you because while it's possible to marry outside of your kind of standard age range, it creates more and more problems in life and in marriage as that age gap extends.

And as you get older, the age gap becomes much more important. And so if you marry when young, you can marry a very high quality candidate and your age gap is together and you start to build a lot of amazing aspects of your life together. Now and the older you get, the 10s, the 9s, the 8s, the 7s, most of these are taken off of the table.

They're no longer available to you. Remember by the way, for the fourth time, this is your own ranking system. If you wanted to create a spousal candidate ranking system that was numeric like this, you could do it. You would sit down and you would list all of the qualities and characteristics that you consider important in a potential spouse.

You would create a numeric rating, really the numbers don't matter, but you would create a simple numeric rating, 0 to 10 works fine. You would say, "Okay, I'm going to rate her physical beauty, 0 to 10, give her X, X number 8 points. I'm going to rank how I feel when I spend time with her, 8.

I'm going to rank how much respect she shows to my parents, 3." You create any number of categories you cared about, give them a ranking and you can come out the other side with a weighted score based upon how important you characterize things are and you could rank a potential wife or a potential husband based upon these scores.

My point is simply that we all have some ranking system and some of us have one or two factors on it, some of us have 102 factors on it, but all of us have a ranking system and if your ranking system is optimized towards marriage, not optimized towards fornication or something else, then the candidates who would be the best husbands and the best wives, your pool shrinks naturally every year that goes by.

Now assuming that's true, what you want to do is be serious about marriage but not obsessed. Serious but not obsessed. What I mean by serious is don't set this aside and say, "This is not important to me," because if you're having a hard time today finding and attracting a suitable spouse, then it's not going to be easier five years from now.

There is no metric by which it's easier for that to happen. The key is to focus on changing whatever needs to be changed to make it easier now and be serious about it. And what I often tell people is if you need to spend money on this, this is a good use of money.

So be serious about it. One thing that's very different for my being middle-aged as compared to being as young as I once was is that today it's very easy for me to talk about serious things in life in a straightforward manner. And I think this is one of the cultural things that we need to change.

Older people, especially older married people, have a generally easy time talking about marriage, pursuing marriage, entering into marriage. It's just easy because we understand how important this is in life and how fundamental it is to our experience of life, to our happiness in life and satisfaction and enjoyment. And so when older people talk to younger people about their romantic relationships, we want young people to win.

We want young people to experience the joy that we've had. And we understand that running away from the subject or talking in riddles is not a way of accomplishing that. For whatever reason, in our youth culture it often doesn't tend to be that way. Our parents often didn't facilitate a culture in which talking about matters of the heart was easy with us.

They often didn't prepare us for what we were going to experience. They didn't talk about things seriously and straightforwardly and openly, talk about the good and the bad, the benefits, the downsides, the difficulties, the things that are easy. And I want to change that. And so my ambition with all of my children, like one of the things that I never permit is I never permit people in personal conversation to make comments that would cause a young person, a young man or young woman, to feel weird or funny about experiencing romantic attraction for other people.

And usually it happens with other fathers and a father will say something about "I want her boyfriends but that's going to be five years off" or "No, that's going to be ten years away" and I always confront this, it's a big deal to me. Matters of the heart should be normal and appropriate conversations between parents and children.

They are private, they need to be respected and don't ever cause young people to feel bad about it. And so my ambition as a father is that when my children all experience their first crush, I want to be the first one they talk about it. When they are totally infatuated with someone, I want to be the first one that knows about it because I've prepared them for that, I've told them it's going to happen, we've talked about it and so when it happens they come to me and they trust me and they know that I never betray their confidence and I'm right there to celebrate these experiences they're having, the attraction and to coach them in managing them in an appropriate and healthy way.

That's my ambition as a father. Time will tell whether it works out but that's my ambition as a father. And so recognize that we need to deal with these things on a straightforward basis and we need to take away the weirdness of the situations in order to improve them.

How do you attract a high-quality spouse? Well I think that it is in a significant way a math equation. Now that's probably a shocking statement for some people to say that attracting a world-class spouse is a math equation. I think first we need to deal with our terms and talk about love and marriage being something that happens to you rather than something that you do.

In general, I think the idea of finding the one is silly. It's a riskable concept and it should be mocked mercilessly in our society. I don't do very well with the mocking but I think I would be happy if I heard more people mocking the concept of I'm just going to find the one, the one person who is right for me.

There is no the one. In a world of eight billion people there is no just one person in the universe who is right for you. There are simply people who are a great fit for you when you are ready to marry and then you stop looking. So you find someone who is a good fit for you at an appropriate phase of life and then you stop looking.

I don't consider my wife to be the one, as in she's the only one in the world who could possibly be for me. Rather she is the one because she is the one that I have chosen. And because of that choice, she is the only one in the world for me.

Now I understand that sounds like blasphemy in a world formed by Disney princesses and Hallmark movies but it's not. It is true, it is the truth that we go through life and even if you look at the most ridiculous rom-com that you are aware of, you will see this played out.

You will see that even in a ridiculous movie that is predicated upon finding "the one", you simply have two people that go through life, all of a sudden they encounter one another at a phase in life at which they are open to the relationship. Then something clicks, they realize we're a good fit, sometimes that happens quickly and is well judged, sometimes it happens slowly and I just needed this event to happen to convince me that he was the one for me.

But they realize that this is a good fit and then they get together and then they stop looking. Now if you don't stop looking, then you wind up committing adultery against your spouse, you wind up divorced and you wind up going through a long series of relationships. But your spouse becomes the one when this is the man or the woman that you choose and then because of that choice, he or she is the one for you.

To illustrate this, I thought of the example of athletics. I think there are many professional athletes who could effectively compete in various sports. If you look at natural athletic ability, it seems to be significantly important to very high level athletic accomplishment. Is somebody who plays professional football, is his life great because he magically chose the right sport for him or is his life great because he worked hard at the sport that he chose?

I think that if we think about that metaphor, we see analogs in romantic relationships. We can see, for example, that there are some sports that are good natural complements for certain athletes and some that aren't. There are some sports in which you do better if you are very small and there are some sports in which you do better if you are very big.

There are some sports that you do better at if you're very fat and there are some sports you do better at if you're very skinny. And so there is a natural component of selection among athletes similar to how there are certain people who just are a good fit and who aren't a good fit for you.

But then within the group of sports that are a good natural complement for an athlete's raw innate characteristics, the athlete becomes great at the sport because he chooses that sport. I guess probably the most famous example would be a guy like Deion Sanders. Deion Sanders, I think, is the only athlete to date to have played in both a Super Bowl and in a World Series, played in the NFL and in Major League Baseball.

But I would say that many athletes who play in the NFL could also play in the NBA and many athletes who play baseball could also play football. Marriage is similar. What happened? But why don't they, right? Well, because they picked a sport at a certain point in time and they specialized in it and then that specialization allowed them to achieve the highest levels.

And marriage is similar. You choose someone who is a good fit for you and then as you build your life together, you wind up becoming world class because you have so many shared memories, so many shared relationships, you have a shared vision, you just have a shared life. So then the idea of anyone else being right for you is unthinkable.

It's basically unthinkable to me that there would be someone else out there in the world who would be a better wife for me because of the shared experience that I have with my wife. We've had so much of our life together that to not be married to her and to then try to build a relationship with someone else, I would be walking away from decades of my own life experience.

And so that's the point is that you can't, if you have 10 years of experience playing football at a high level, you can't just automatically walk away from that and compete with someone who has 10 years of experiencing baseball at a high level. The specialization becomes intense. So recognize that the one is not because you just got to magically find a person in the world who is the one for you, but rather that you are going to choose one person from potential candidates and then as you enter into and pass through a maturing relationship, then that person will be the one because of the choice that you made and become quite literally the only one in the world for you.

What is the math equation for attracting a spouse? Well, it's not math, but I think it's basically this. You have to find a suitable, high-quality potential spouse at the right time of your life and then successfully woo and attract that person into marriage. If any of those three things aren't working, then your marriage prospects are dimmed or doomed.

And so to maximize your marriage prospects, you want to work on all three of these to the best of your abilities. What are the three? Again, you have to find a suitable, high-quality potential spouse, find. That is a whole process of the potential candidates that are available, your interaction with those candidates and the screening ability that you have to find a suitable, high-quality potential spouse at the right time of your life.

What is the right time of your life? Well, you decide, but it's an important component and many people say, "Well, it's not the right time right now and it's not the right time because it's going to be eight more years because I'm going to build my career or four more years because I'm going to graduate from college or whatever the right time is," but then your candidate pool becomes smaller.

And so I'm pleading with you to not ignore the importance of age and be open to it at many times in life while also acknowledging that sometimes you got to do certain things and make changes and change takes time. So you have to find a suitable, high-quality potential spouse at the right time of life and then successfully woo and attract him or her into marriage.

You have to be attractive enough to the person that you want to be attracted to you in order to actually engage in a relationship that leads to marriage. Notice my emphasis on engage in a relationship that leads to marriage. That's hard to do. There's a wide pool of candidates of people that you could be friends with.

There's a smaller pool of candidates of people that you could have some kind of romantic-ish relationship or situationship with. There's a wide pool of people that you could have a sexual relationship with. But to attract someone into a marriage relationship and then actually see it through to consummation is a different proposition and it requires a different approach.

So you should be careful in this who you take advice from. One of the things that I find interesting as a cultural observer is how few people there are who are happily and successfully married who are talking about how they accomplished that. What I'm doing at the moment is a little unusual.

There's a world of dating coaches available to you who will teach you how to date. There aren't so many people who are in long-term enduring relationships who are trying to teach you how to build a long-term enduring relationships. Most of us who are in that situation, it's just not important to us.

I don't want to go and do that. So I'm doing my best because I care about it. But recognize that if you want to know how to get married, you should spend your time asking married people how that happened for them. If you're a young man and you want to get married, you should spend more time with married men as compared to single men and find out what those married men did.

If you're a young woman and you want to spend time with married women and find out how did this happen, what did you do, what advice do you have for someone like me? And notice, by the way, that our society is generally structured in a way to make that difficult.

So you've got a church and you have the singles groups and the married groups. But if you're single and you want to be in the married group, you need to spend time in the single group because that's possibly where your potential spouse might be, but you need to get the advice from the married group.

So you've got to create it for yourself. Here is my advice for you if you want to follow this through. Assume that today you're listening to me and you're saying, "Joshua, I'm single. I would like to get married. What can I do?" Here is my advice. Step one, I want you to create a comprehensive image of what you would consider to be someone that would be your dream spouse.

If you're a man and you're sitting there and you're thinking, I want you to create in your mind a picture of the perfect woman that you would run down the aisle to marry with zero reservations, zero hesitation, no holding back whatsoever. I want you to picture her in your mind.

Now, picturing her is not enough. What we need to do is we need to get that picture out of your mind and onto paper where we can analyze it. You do this in whatever way is comfortable for you. Take out a sheet of paper in your journal and write, "My perfect wife" at the top of it.

Pull out a note on your phone and title it, "My perfect wife." If you're a lady, sit down and record a voice memo and say, "My perfect husband." Make it out. You're going to transcribe it. Some way of getting this on paper. Then I want you to spend time writing down every feature, characteristic, quality, attribute.

Write down everything that you can think of that you would dream about of the perfect man or woman for me. Again, put yourself in a mental frame in which you would experience zero hesitation to move towards marriage. Get a crystal clear picture as much as is possible of every attribute, feature, characteristic, quality, everything related to this person.

Do not censor yourself in any way. What I mean is all of us live under social obligations and we experience some form of censorship. We all would censor our words. We would provide some kind of characteristic of disclaimers or whatever if we actually expressed what we really wanted. The censorship that we would generally apply to our words applies also to our thoughts because when we've experienced the social pressure that we all experience, even in our own thoughts, we're always censoring ourselves and saying, "Well, I want this but I shouldn't want that," or, "It's just not right for me." I'm going to encourage you, do not censor yourself at all.

If this should be your thing, put it in lock and key, put it in an encrypted note. No one else is ever going to read this thing. You write down every characteristic that you want, every dream that you have of an absolute 10 out of 10, an absolute dream spouse for you.

Take multiple days, multiple weeks. Takes as long as you want. Make it a running list. Anytime you observe someone, let's say you're over at dinner at a friend's house and you observe his wife doing something, write that down. I have this video I show to people of this couple that I randomly found, and I just was amazed at how the woman looked at the husband while they're recording the video.

I thought, "That's something that I never would have thought of writing down. She looks at me a certain way when recording a video," but you can just see that expression of the way that woman looks at her husband. It's amazing. Write down every feature, attribute, everything you can imagine and make a comprehensive list.

Make it as long as possible and don't censor yourself or judge yourself or criticize yourself on any of these things at this stage. That's step one. Now, set that list aside. Let it percolate for an appropriate amount of time, days, couple of weeks, whatever. Then bring out that list and read it carefully.

Print it out, put it on your desk, read it carefully. And then you're going to make another list. Say while you're imagining this perfect person, I'm going to use a man's example, you're imagining your perfect wife. Put that list of all the characteristics and attributes that she has on one sheet of paper.

Put the second sheet of paper and say, "I'm going to now describe the perfect man that this perfect woman would be attracted to." So for every feature or attribute or characteristic, quality that you described about your perfect wife, she's going to have a corresponding character, feature, or attribute that would correspond to what you wrote down.

You wrote down that my ideal wife is a woman who is honest. She's honest. Well, is she going to be attracted to somebody who is dishonest? No. So you write honest. Let's say that she's physically beautiful, she dresses well, she looks stunning at all times. Well, is a woman who dresses well and is very physically beautiful?

Is she likely to be attracted to somebody who dresses like a slob? Probably not. So you would say, you know, dresses well, dresses suitably. And there is texture that is necessary in this, because most relationships that are successful involve a man and a woman who complement one another. The word "complement" does not mean are the same as one another.

And so if she dresses like a prima donna at all times, just absolutely and totally into fashion, does that mean that she's automatically into the guy who dresses like a dandy at all times? My answer would be no, she's not necessarily. Now sometimes you see those kinds of couples and they seem to get along together, but there is a range of appropriateness that if she cares about the way that she dresses, then at the very least a man that she's likely to be attracted to is presentable and is not completely thoughtless.

And so you figure out what the range is for each characteristic. You know, let's say that you wrote down someone who's very intelligent. Well, is she likely to be attracted to somebody who's not intelligent? Write down all of the attributes of it. Picture this woman and write down the perfect man that she would be attracted to.

Similarly, if you're a woman and you're doing this exercise, you wrote down the perfect man, write down all of the attributes of the perfect wife that he would just be thrilled to marry from everything that you know, you've observed, you've heard about, you've learned about, you've asked other people about.

That's step two. Take as much time as necessary, days, weeks, months, doesn't matter, just take time and get a clear clarity on it. But hopefully this is days and weeks. Then come back to that list, give it a short time, days or weeks, come back to that list number two.

And now here's the hard part. You need to grade yourself on how well you match up to that perfect person. So again, using a man's perspective, I made list A was my perfect wife. Every feature attribute I could do. List B was the kind of man that this woman is likely to be attracted to.

What kind of man would she run down the aisle to meet? And now I'm going to grade myself on those things. Zero to ten works fine. You say, well, she's going to be attracted to someone who's, you know, I wrote down that she's beautiful and athletic and we like to do runs together.

And so she's going to be attracted to someone who's beautiful and athletic, great. So I'm a ten out of ten out of ten. Then, you know, she's going to be attracted to someone who has a lot of money so that he can provide for her. But I'm flat broke, so I'm one out of ten.

Or she's going to be attracted to somebody who has good social skills and is able to interact with her in a positive way or makes her feel good and whatever the things are that you wrote. I just, I don't have those skills. And you grade yourself and compare yourself to that perfect man as best you can imagine him to be.

You now have your to-do list, your self-improvement list. After I finish this line of thinking that I'm going down, I'll come back and give you some suggestions for what should be on that list if you yourself can't come up with that list. But I don't want to do that here because I want to emphasize this is your list.

These are the things that you can change about yourself and you get started on changing those things. And there's no reason to wait. Get started on changing those things. You can't coerce someone into a marriage with you. You have to attract a person into a marriage with you. You can't guarantee for certain what is likely to attract a specific person.

We all have strange and unusual things that for us are individual. But you can start to create an appropriate level of commonality by imagining what you think is your ideal marriage partner and then by starting to become what you think would be the ideal marriage partner for that person.

And so while the individual expressions on a very small level will be very negotiable, the big things aren't. Just a goofy example. I drink coffee. My wife doesn't drink coffee ever. She doesn't like it. Never has. Never will. My wife drinks tea. Okay, I'm fine with drinking tea. You could sit down and you could say, "Oh, the ideal woman that I would want to be in a relationship with would be – would match me for my interest in coffee.

And so I'm going to become super" – whatever the expression of it. The point is that this is a minor unimportant thing. It just doesn't matter at all whether someone likes coffee or doesn't like coffee or shares your taste in wines or doesn't share your taste in wines. What is a big deal is wants to have children, doesn't want to have children.

Things like that are non-negotiable, like non-starters. You can't – that has to be key. And so you will ultimately rank these things and a lot of this will just work out in the wash and you'll say, "Oh, I put down that she must like coffee but after all, here's this great girl that doesn't like coffee.

No big deal." But you want to start moving yourself in the direction of being someone who's likely to be attractive to the kind of person that you want to attract. I'm not going to dictate these things to you and no one else should either. But the person that you are in reality should attract the kind of person that you want to be with and repel the kind of people that you don't want to be with.

And you can do that by making a list, number one, of your ideal spouse. Number two, making a fantasy list of the kind of person that your ideal spouse is likely to be attracted to and then measuring yourself as compared to that person that you've made up and saying, "What do I need to change?" and then get busy changing it.

Now after you've done that and while you are busy changing it, the next thing that you want to do is go back to that image you've created, the avatar you've created of your perfect wife or your perfect husband, and then make another list. And the list is, "Where is this person likely to be?" Seeking the truth never gets old.

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Download June's Journey now on your Android or iOS device or play on PC through Facebook games. Where does this person spend time? If you wrote, "I want someone who is Christian like me," then there's a bigger chance that she's in church on Sunday morning than at the club on Saturday night.

If you wrote down, "I want someone who is athletic," there's a bigger chance that she's in the hiking club that is going out on Saturday morning than in the chess club. If you wrote, "I want someone who is intelligent," there's a bigger chance that she is in college than that she's working in a factory.

You get the point. Where is this person? And here I think you should also consider what online communities is this person a part of. There's going to be a difference between, I don't know, meetmyhusband.com versus Tinder. There's going to be a big difference in different apps and different platforms that people are likely to be.

And so you need to ask yourself, where is this person likely to be? Then next step is go back to your calendar. After you've made the list of where is this person, go back to your calendar and count up the number of times in the last month that you have actually been in the place that your ideal husband or wife is or could be found.

There are a couple of things that can go wrong in the process of finding and attracting a suitable spouse, and we can analyze these things under those three layers that I said. What is the equation for attracting a spouse? You have to find a suitable high-quality potential spouse at the right time of life and successfully woo and attract him or her into marriage.

So we've spent some time on successfully wooing and attracting him or her into marriage. We've talked about becoming the kind of person that would be attractive to this spouse. We've talked a little bit about the right time of life. If you're 15 years old and you want to get married, there aren't that many people in your high school classroom that want to get married, not the right time of life.

So we're going to be at the right time of life. But then you have to find the suitable spouse. And so you say, well, where's the problem? Is the problem that I'm not attractive or is the problem that I'm just not spending any time finding and I'm not spending time looking?

And a lot of people that I interact with tell me, Joshua, I want to get married. If I ask you the question, how many potential candidates did you meet in the last month? The answer is zero. So we don't need to automatically assume that the problem is because you're unattractive.

Maybe the problem is that you're just not actually meeting anybody. And this is understandable, by the way. No one would find fault with you. You're frustrated. You had a bad breakup. You're annoyed with not getting matched online or whatever it is. That's all understandable. But understandable doesn't mean that you're actually going to get the outcome if it doesn't happen.

There's a lot of people that go through life expecting that magically someday the wonderful girl from heaven is going to knock on the front door and propose to me on the doorstep never having met me. And it's absurd. It's an absurd concept. And we need to recognize it's absurd and then change it.

So if you're working on your personal attractiveness and you're at the right time of life in which you want to marry, then you need to be out meeting potential candidates. You need to be meeting people. And then we can try to figure out what's working and what's not working.

And so how many times in the last month have you been in these places where your ideal spouse is? How many available women have you met? Or how many available men have you met? Or how many available attractive men and women have you met? People that you think are appropriate for you based upon your values and your list, have you met?

And if the answer is two in the last six months, the chances of you being married two years from now are very low. On the other hand, if the answer is 10 in the last six weeks, then now we've got pretty good odds. And we can go back and we can analyze those numbers and say, "Well, what's going well?

What's not going well?" And this is where you could be coached further with appropriate texture. If you're a guy, I met 10 women who were unmarried, seemed like the kind of people that I would be interested in getting to know and dating to see if there would be a relationship there.

I asked 10 women out and all 10 said no. All right. Well, something's wrong. Why did 10 out of 10 say no to you? And are you a weirdo? Do you come across as obsessive? Again, serious, not obsessed. We don't want to be a weirdo. We don't want to pull off bad vibes.

Are you – and I'm not going to go down, but you can analyze it. What you can't do necessarily is have any luck if someone says, "I've met zero women in the last six weeks and I don't care." Well, you're not going to be married six years from now if you don't change that.

So you need to change, number one, who you are, if there's something unattractive about who you are, to your ideal spouse. Number two, you need to change where you are and be spending time in places where your potential candidates are likely to be. Remember the saying, "What gets measured gets managed." If you can see that something – that if you did something, that that could likely lead to better outcomes for a goal that you are seeking.

And if it's something that you're capable of measuring, then it's something that you should measure so that you could manage it. And measuring yourself against the attributes that you think your perfect potential spouse would value in you so that you can manage them is good. And then measuring the number of potential candidates that you meet through your activities and through what you're doing in life, that's also something that could lead to the initiation of a relationship.

Not everything is math, but you can develop the skills that are necessary. And if you can measure these things, then you can coach yourself into what skills do you need to do. You may need to develop social skills of meeting people, striking up a conversation, asking someone out. You may need to develop social skills of creating an intimate communication in relationship.

You need – there's all kinds of skills, but all of these are projects. These are things that can be done. And there is no person in the world who with time, practice, focus, a little bit of outside analysis and good coaching and focus on skill set development can't develop all of the skills necessary to initiate a successful romantic relationship, lead it into and through marriage, found a family.

All of those things are totally possible. So regardless of whether it's as easy as it once was or not, it is possible and it can be done and it can be done by any person. There are certain factors that make it naturally easier and you may or may not have those factors, but it doesn't matter.

You have the factors that you have and you should focus on moving them forward. By way of review, what I suggest, step one, make a list of your perfect ideal spouse and all of her characteristics, attributes, qualities, features, everything. Number two, make a list of the kind of person that your ideal spouse would likely be attracted to, everything that you can think of, especially based upon what you described as important.

Number three, compare yourself as objectively as possible to that ideal man or ideal person and figure out where your strengths are and where your weaknesses are and work on your weaknesses as best you are able to. Number four, make a list of where your ideal spouse spends time and is in this moment and then ask yourself, how much time am I actually spending in that place?

Then track the number of potential candidates that you are meeting by being in that place and then track the results of what happens. An example that is really good for younger people, especially I want to speak to younger men for a moment. If you are a younger man, there is a very high probability that the woman that you would consider to be a dream wife is in a college somewhere.

In our current environment, most intelligent, capable, hardworking women are going to go to college. Women are going to college at a rate twice as high as men and they are likely to be in college. You can filter colleges based upon ideology. Many colleges will attract certain kinds of people and repel certain kinds of people.

If there is a certain type of woman that you are looking for, she is probably going to be in a certain college. The best thing to do, especially when you are young, is probably to be in that kind of environment. I don't want to focus on a long discourse of this, but this is important because remember back to phases of life.

If you are 18, 20, 22 years old, 24 years old, 27 years old, it is relatively easy for you to be in college and for you to naturally interact with dozens and dozens and dozens of people who might be a high quality spouse for you. On the other hand, if you are 40 years old, it is much more difficult for you to be in that environment.

So this is one of the things that timing matters. So my point of spending time in it is one of the strategies that I think is a good strategy for people to consider, especially for men who often have a very difficult time with online dating, is how can you get yourself into an appropriate college environment.

Go ahead and take a master's degree, work out at the on-campus gym, make sure you have a legitimate non-creepy reason to be in the college environment and then meet lots of people. It's relatively easy as a guy to meet a dozen new girls per week around the college environment, whereas if you're 35 years old and you're working 70 hours a week, it's much more difficult for you to meet a dozen new girls per week without some other elaborate system of introductions.

So go through this process and check yourself, meaning rate yourself, track how many people did I meet, what happened in those conversations. I met a girl at the gym, we had a short conversation, it was pleasant, it was great, but here's what happened and then see what is happening in terms of moving the relationship forward.

That's the process that is useful and if you go through that process, probably by now, even in your mind, you automatically know some things that you could or would change that might help you get a better outcome of a potential spouse. I would love it if you would stop now and do those exercises before you hear what I'm about to say.

Let me tell you what I'm about to say so that you can stop if it would be appropriate. I'm going to give you some specifics that are broadly applicable, specifics for men and specifics for women, that are things that will help you to be generally more attractive and I'm doing this because this is what I wish that I had had when I was younger.

When I was younger, I was not serious about finding a wife, just happened because I ended up in the natural environment and I met a woman that I clicked with and it happens naturally. That's what happens for most people and what happened in the past, but I didn't come from a culture that was as broken around dating as the current culture and so I didn't need this strong plan.

The current dating culture is increasingly broken and it's broken a lot since I was in college. It's gotten much more difficult for young men and women and that's why I'm spending more time on it, but I wish still in hindsight I look back and I think why didn't somebody tell me how important some of these factors were and so I try to do my job to coach young men and young women on some of the factors that while not any one of them is the factor, it's the collection of these traits and features that are probably going to influence the outcomes that you have and when I interact with people who are not successful with women or not successful with men, it's rare to find people who are maximizing these characteristics and attributes that are having that level of success.

I want you to listen to what I'm going to continue on with, but I would love it if you would make your own lists first. So if you're going to do this exercise, you're the kind of person who does it, pause the episode, go through, spend the next three or four weeks doing these exercises that I've described for you and then come back and listen to what I'm about to say.

If you're the kind of person who never stops when someone says stop, then just listen, but just know that I'm going to probably pollute your mind a little bit with giving you attributes and characteristics that are broadly influential on most male and female relationships. Listening now so you can stop the episode, five, four, three, two, one.

I'm going to give you a list of characteristics and what I'm going to share with you is not original with me. It comes from an awkwardly titled YouTube channel called Ho Math. Ho Math has become a very large producer on TikTok and on YouTube and is increasingly growing. And back around last year in December, which is actually when the video that I'm referencing and drawing from came out, I came across this channel and I immediately saw that this particular channel in our current moment is an extremely useful and somewhat balanced perspective on relationship formation in the current world.

If you're looking for coaches or guides on relationship formation, we face an enormous problem. And let me describe the problem to you so that you can understand where to go for advice. The first problem is that the dating marketplace, the sexual marketplace for young people who are dating has been completely transformed in the last decade for a variety of features.

And so many older people, my generation and older, who are not paying attention, they don't understand how much things have changed, genuinely changed. There are many reasons for this, but just something as simple as social media has completely transformed male and female relationships from being kind of a natural thing where you interacted with people who were in your social sphere to now young men and women are accessing people from all around the world.

In former times, it was very normal that you went to high school, you went to college, you had your social circle was limited by those you were in high school with and those you were in college with, and that the people that you interacted with were drawn from that limited social circle.

Well, today that's entirely different. Today, any man and most importantly any woman can go online, create a profile, and instantly – generally the women – receive male attention from people all around the world. And so this has dramatically changed relationship dynamics for young men and women that now as a young man you're not just in competition with the people in your high school class or your college environment, you're now in competition with people from all around the world at all different ages.

And so this has changed the dynamics. Older people generally, unless they're paying attention and asking young people for their experience, don't have an accurate view of where things are at the moment. The next thing that you have to filter for is basically ideology or philosophy. We are becoming a more segregated society where people of an intense ideology are congregating together.

And so you can have this for men and for women. I'm most familiar with the male space. But let's say that I become a red-pilled, in-cell MGTOW guy. And so I spend all my time consuming MGTOW, which is an acronym MGTOW, men going their own way. And I'm spending all my time with the red-pilled MGTOW folks.

And that's all I listen to. I can do this when I'm young, I can do this when I'm older. Usually with the younger guys it winds up being the pickup artist space and basically the sleep with as many women as possible and abuse them space. Andrew Tate and many people in his sphere would be emblematic of this.

If you're an older guy then it becomes the divorced folks, it becomes the entrepreneurs and cars people and all of the 40s and 50-year-old guys. And what happens is you get into this echo chamber, so you watch one video and the algorithm feeds you another video. And six months later you basically despise women and you just despise women and you become totally toxic to women because of your misogynistic despising of women.

And you look at some of the people who talk about this, it just becomes a self-reinforcing expression of it. Whereas meanwhile guys who are happily married and appreciate women, they tend to be pretty attractive to women because they appreciate women and they don't just look down on women. And I'm sure that there's a similar effect in female circles where I'm generally pretty repulsed by like hardcore pink-haired feminist types.

And it's fine, they want to repulse me, they want to repel me and so I'm repulsed by them. But what happens is that they're not receiving energy from people like me who I consider myself a fairly upstanding, virtuous man of integrity who appreciates and who is respectful of women.

And I have opinions and ideas that she might disagree with, but I treat women with respect in all circumstances. And so she's repelling guys like me, but then she's going to create a sphere group of guys who don't have that perspective to her and who would mistreat her. And so it's no surprise that two or three years later she winds up hating men because of this.

After all, that's what she's been exposed to. I watched this happen to a friend of mine that I graduated from, a friend of mine from school, moved to New York, wound up in kind of this super ambitious culture that was very unfriendly to marriage and kind of just natural relationships.

Today she's a blue-haired lesbian, feminist type, and it's a totally natural thing. But she wasn't that way. There was nothing innate about her that was that way. It was that the culture that she got involved in changed her, and so we want to be careful of cultural influences. And today, since we all choose our cultural voices to a degree based upon who we choose to pay attention to, it's really important that we develop filtering mechanisms for people that have a balance, and an appreciation, a knowledge, and a balance.

I say all that to say that I think Homath, as much as I don't like saying the name of his channel and his platform, is one of those guys who's probably a useful and insightful observer because of his own experience and because of what he's done. So he published this video back in December of 2023 called Zones Version 3, The Most Useful Relationship Map in History.

I'll link to it in the show notes. And in this, he goes over a diagram that he drew that I think is broadly useful to understand male and female attraction. It's not—when I say—you're smart enough to understand words like broadly, like broadly this is useful. And because it's broadly useful, I consider it an important thing to discuss.

You can watch the original version. I would encourage you to watch the original version. I'm just going to go over some of the factors that you might want to consider in terms of assessing why am I unable to attract the kind of person that I want to attract. And these factors are different for men and for women.

I'm going to begin with what men are attracted to in women because they are somewhat simpler. When I say simpler, one of the insights that I think is useful from this particular relationship map is the introduction of texture to say that men analyze women differently than women analyze men.

From my experience and observation, I think this is true. For the kind of woman that a man is attracted to, men basically have one scale. We can label it as 0 to 10. And in the actual video, HOMATH goes through different levels as far as the kinds of relationships that men will engage in with women.

As someone who is mostly interested in marriage, I understand we need to be aware of this, but I'm mostly interested in helping people to get to marriage, not to just multiple relationships. But the point is that men could rate women and do rate women on a scale of 0 to 10 on a single scale and that the features in this scale are additive.

Men have one meter to say, "Are you a keeper? Are you a seven and over that I'm going to commit to or are you not?" And if you're going to be a 10, it's the accumulation of these features. Now, going from most important to least important for men, we can factor these in.

So according to HOMATH's chart, he would say that the most important thing for men where you get the most points is your body, is a woman's body. And so a body would include factors such as body type. She has a body type that I'm attracted to, her voice, how does she speak, fitness, level of personal fitness, the attractiveness of her face, her hair, pheromones or just a general sense and chemistry.

Then you have personality. Generally men are attracted to women who are supportive, who are helpful, who are reliable, women who are interesting, who are talented, who are fun to be with, who have a high IQ, who are intelligent and who are emotional bonding. Then you have the factors related to purity.

So is she a woman who is loyal to me? What is her history with men, her sexual history? What baggage does she bring to the table of her life? Is she modest? Does she express modesty? Is she innocent? Is she willing to be exclusive with me? Does she want children?

Does she have a lot of guy "friends" that she indulges in her life? And then small factors that barely matter at all to men such as there's certain conveniences or possessions or quirks about her. And the idea is that these things are cumulative. Not any one factor is something that is going to be the factor.

But for a man, if he looks at the overall package and says, "Okay, she's got a body type that I'm attracted to. She's in good shape. We seem to have good chemistry. She's got hair I like. Maybe her face is not naturally the most beautiful, but it's acceptable. She's super supportive.

She makes me feel strong and confident in myself. She's really fun to be around. She's loyal to me. She doesn't have a lot of baggage. She's generally modest. She treats me well. She wants children." A man says, "She's great. I'm going to marry her." It's one dimension that is cumulative.

So if you're a woman who is looking to attract a man, I would encourage you go through that list that I just read to you and look through the list and ask yourself, "How can I optimize each of these things?" And men will tell you if you ask them.

The problem that many young women who desire to marry today is that they're optimizing for things that men don't value. They're optimizing for things that society is optimizing for men, and men are not generally attracted to men. They're attracted to women. And so this is why, if you're a woman and you're in good shape and you are encouraging to a man and you build his confidence and you're supportive of him and you wear a cute dress and you cook a great meal, good chance that he's seeing you as wife material.

And he's not so impressed by the fact that you're the president of the XYZ Society and that you've written four books and published those things, because those things are not that big a deal to him. They're not unimportant. They're an expression of your IQ and your talent and things like that, but they're not that important.

So consider these features and optimize for them. I think you can do both if you're a woman who is really interested in your professional development and you're very much focused on pursuing your career. All that is great, but you also need to adapt to the feminine qualities that men appreciate and bring those things to him for him to be attracted to you.

The point is that there's one meter and it's a cumulative matter of these factors. So if you're lacking in one factor that is attractive to your ideal husband, if you can improve the other factors that are under your control, then you can do that and be fine. Now switching now for the male audience.

Of the things that are attractive to women, especially someone to whom you're going to marry, because for men who want to marry a woman, it seems as though things can go wrong on multiple levels. What I mean is it can go wrong in the sense that you're just not attracted to women, period, and no woman wants to be with you.

On the other hand, you can have a woman who wants to be with you, but she's not willing to marry you. Or you might find someone who likes to be with you, but she's not willing to be in a romantic relationship with you. And the insight that I appreciate from what Homath created is that according to him, there are two metrics by which women evaluate men.

They are the metrics of security, or what we can call a good guy score, and the metrics of attraction, or what we can call a bad boy score. And both of these are generally important to women. If a man provides high degrees of security, meaning he's a good guy, but he doesn't provide high degrees of attraction, then he winds up friend-zoned.

And that was one of the things that I didn't understand when I was in college. I was friend-zoned continually because I was always high security and low attraction. I didn't understand that you had to optimize for both of those things in order to attract the attention of women. Now I subconsciously optimized for both of those things with my wife based upon the way that our relationship emerged.

Today I can look back and I can see that, but I was blind to it at the time. I thought, "Well, I want to be a good guy, and if I'm a good guy, then those would be the things that would be attractive to women." And I was a good guy who got friend-zoned continually.

It's important for men to understand this because it's utterly maddening if you think that what women are looking for is just good guys, and you think, "I'm a good guy. I have lots of good guy characteristics. What is going on? What's wrong with me?" And you need to understand that's not the only thing.

And I'm emphasizing this because there is a high correlation between the kinds of young men who are listening to what I'm saying right now an hour and 40 minutes deep into this podcast and the bad dating outcomes that some men are getting. It's because you are optimized for being a good guy, for providing high security for a woman, but you're not optimizing for attraction.

You don't have a decent bad boy score. So if you are optimizing for high security but not for attraction, and you just have a good guy score and no bad boy score, then you wind up getting friend-zoned. Now if we pivot to the other dimension, and if any of this is confusing, just watch the video and you'll understand, but if we pivot to the other dimension, we have where you're optimizing for attraction.

We can call this your bad boy score. Now here is what women are often attracted to. They're attracted to bad boys, men who have great sex appeal and express very masculinity and confidence in various ways that turn them on, but these relationships don't often wind up in marriage. You have just straight out sex appeal or some version of a situationship, which is what many women, at least if I listen to what they say, are in today, that is not resulting in marriage.

And so they're choosing men who are very attractive, either for a purely sexual relationship or they become one of multiple women that he has available to him in some kind of situationship and they're hoping that, "Well, someday he's going to pick me," and in reality he never does because he doesn't provide that level of security that she would necessarily even say yes to him, and/or he's just not interested in marriage.

If we can optimize on both of these scales, the good guy score and the bad boy score, if we can optimize on both of these as a man, then there's a much higher probability that you would be able to attract your ideal wife to you and see that relationship all the way through to marriage.

So what makes up these scores? Let's start with the good guy score, and the idea here is that these things would be added up. So we'll start with the kind of higher level aspects. The first one is labeled by HOMATH as investment. So a big one is money. Do you have money?

Do you have the ability to spend money on a woman? Do you have the ability to spend money on her and on her lifestyle? I want to quickly hasten to add this should not cause you to be embittered if you are a man. There is a common point of bitterness where men will say, "Well, she's just in it for money." And that is the case.

Some superficial women might say, "Well, I just want him to spend lots of money on me." But money is a decent proxy for a woman for her future security. And so your ability to have money is a good guy score. This is your ability to provide security for her.

If she is going to be in a relationship with you and she is going to give you her youth and her beauty and bear your children, then the amount of security that you can provide for her is an important component. And so it should be your ambition to have money so that you can spend money on her.

And not all spending money or having money is just frivolous and superficial. It may be expressed differently at different times in a woman's life. But money is an important feature. Wealthy guys have a much easier time attracting women because of their ability to provide financial support. So investment means money.

Quality time. Is he a guy who invests into her and provides quality time? Is a man supportive? Does he provide commitment? Is he emotionally available and emotional bonding? Does he change his lifestyle for her? These are very highly important things that a woman is probably going to consider to be very important.

And it's very high on the good guy score. It gives you lots of points. Next you have your presentability. Your appearance. Do you dress well? Do you present yourself well in terms of your physical appearance? Do you have good social skills? Are you the kind of person who is comfortable in various situations and able to draw people out with good social skills?

Likeability. Reputation. Are you thought well of by others in the community? Your reputation is very important to women and a woman is likely to draw some measure, some significant measure of her attraction to you based upon how attractive you are to other people in the community, both men and in many cases especially women.

Then you have the category of loyalty. Are you a man who is trustworthy? Are you willing to be monogamous with her and exclusive? Are you a man who exercises and demonstrates self-control? And then there are the bonus factors which matter a lot maybe, I guess. Homa says they matter a lot to many women of conveniences and possessions and where you're from and little quirks and idiosyncrasies and about a bazillion different things that could cause you to be that special someone that she really likes.

Now the important point here is that all of these are good guy scores. They're all things that you can and should optimize for and they're important on the good guy score. They are not sufficient, however, to move you into the husband zone or Prince Charming zone. So you have a separate set of metrics that are your bad boy score or your attraction.

So what are those features of your bad boy score? And they don't have to be negative. Just to be clear, when we say bad boy, we're using a cultural meme. You understand what it means. It doesn't mean that you have to be a morally defective man to have a bad boy score.

You can be an upright and morally righteous man and have a very high bad boy score. That's just a meme for it. So let's start at most important or kind of working from the hardcore end down and these are additive. So you have a man's body. Is he a body type that is attractive to her?

What is his height? Very tall, not so tall, very short. What is his voice like? His muscularity? What are his hands like? His level of fitness? How attractive is his face? What's the amount of chemistry that you have together? What are the pheromones? Is he a man who has good hygiene, good posture, good fashion sense?

These are things related to your body. Then you have factors related to your masculinity, your competence in something, your confidence, your personal confidence and your competence. Are you strong, tough, smart? Do you have a high income? Are you powerful? Are you fun? Are you very skillful, have a lot of talent?

Are you a very high status man? Are you respected by others? Are you dominant? Are you funny, smooth, capable, sly, persevering, mysterious, popular? Are you comfortable to be around? Are you stoic? Do you have good leadership, a strong frame? Are you protective, aggressive? Or are you optimistic, self-assured, positive?

Those are kind of the light traits or the dark traits, or I'm superior, I always get my way, nobody better mess with me, kind of these strong features. And so the point is to go down that list and just ask yourself, could I optimize for some of these other features?

And if you're able to optimize on both scales, then the chances are good that you'll be broadly attractive to women generally, which will improve your ability to attract the highest quality woman. And back to your kind of sample set, your bell curve, let's say that you would like to marry a woman who for you on your metrics is an 8 or 9, 7, 8, 9, 10, something like that, well, if you can optimize for these things early in life, then you have the highest possible chances of optimizing or being able to see this through to fruition, to matrimony and beyond.

So the key lesson is that I thought Ho Math did so beautifully at clarifying as something that I learned the hard way. It's not enough just to be a good guy. You want to maximize for both of those things, for both metrics, for your attraction factors and for your security factors.

And if you will maximize or optimize for both of those things and find some expression that is appropriate for you, then it will be simpler and easier for you to catch the eye of an attractive woman, someone that you would like to pursue further to the next step of the relationship.

She has to do her part to become an attractive woman, but you also have to do your part to understand how to be appealing to the kind of woman that you would like to attract. Some people have many of these characteristics naturally. I don't know if they're innate, but at least they didn't have to intentionally acquire these characteristics.

Some people come by many of these characteristics just as a product of their upbringing or their parents or how they were trained, whatever the natural reasons are that they have them. But it's better, I think, to listen to people who've had to learn things the hard way and figure out, "Wait a second.

I don't have that. What's going wrong?" and then figure out how to fix it so that you can make it go right. And I would suggest to you that this is a good place to start. I'll link the video in the show notes, but I think it's useful and a good list for you to work down.

I close with just simply the encouragement that I want to leave you with. There are good reasons to want to be married. You want to be serious about it so that you can get good results, but not obsessed with it. Being obsessed with getting married winds up being creepy.

So don't be obsessed with it. That creates a very kind of weird air for men or for women, both across, that winds up moving you into creep-ville. Don't be a creep. So be serious about it, not obsessed with it. The reason to be serious about it is simply that the ease of getting successfully married is it's much easier when you are younger and you get better long-term outcomes.

And people are most likely to not be serious when they are younger. And so if you are younger, the best strategy is simply to be serious about it. A young man or woman who knows he or she wants to be married and is serious about it, and by serious I mean working hard on your own characteristics, meeting people, interacting with people, thinking about characteristics, and looking for a very high-quality potential spouse, and then being willing to move down the relationship pathway to marriage when that occurs, will get the best outcomes.

You'll get the best outcomes for multiple levels. You'll get all the benefits of marrying when young in terms of the relationship built together. It's easier to marry young because you're not set in your ways, you're able to interact with your potential spouse. As long as you're not getting married too young, you know that this is what you want to do, you know that this is the pathway you go down, you have enough life experience not to feel like it's a ball and chain or any of that stuff.

As long as you're ready and you know that, then being married young comes with enormous benefits for your marriage. It comes with enormous benefits for your ability to have children, and potentially more than a handful. It comes with enormous benefits for you in the long term. A man who marries young and who has a wife who believes in him and invests into him, I think is able generally to advance much more quickly in the world because of the transforming influence of that marriage.

And a woman who marries young I think has a great opportunity, as long as she chooses someone of good moral character, has a great opportunity to have the best guy that she's capable of attracting. If she waits longer and she just optimizes for sex for some old professional athlete or something like that, then she loses out on the guy who would be the best guy to marry.

And the whole marriage equation changes for men as they become more attractive and more competent and have more money, then a lot of things change as they get older. And so it's a very difficult mass of problems to work your way through. So optimizing for these things when young is really helpful and important, but not obsessing over them.

And if you're getting good results and you see that, "Hey, I'm meeting people, I'm generally able to attract people who would be a good fit, and it's just a matter of finding the right person at the right time of life," just continue what you're doing. If you're not getting good results, you're not able to find a suitable or high quality potential spouse, or you're not able to attract people into dating relationships, something's going wrong, take a hard look and try to figure out where is the problem and identify it.

Because it will not be easier for you down the road. It is not easier when you're older, especially men. Hear me clearly. There is an entirely false idea that is being spread right now for young men. The false idea is this, "Well, as a man, you're more attractive to women when you're older and wealthier and more established and everything is going well, and so therefore it's no problem.

You don't need to be serious about getting married. It's no problem at all." This is false, and it will give you a false sense of security if you're not serious about it. Now, it can be something that is a matter of hope. At any point in time, a man or woman could marry or can marry.

There's no age at which you can't do it. As you proceed throughout life, it's good to have that hope alive and say, "What's going on? Why am I not married?" Again, is it a matter of my attractiveness to an ideal candidate? Is it a matter of finding where these people are, or is it a matter of the ability to see them through?

But young men especially are having this false hope, and they're saying, "Hey, it's going to be easier for me down the road." This is not true, and it's not true for multiple reasons. Yes, you can attract various—you may be able to attract women into a sexual relationship with you.

In today's world where promiscuity is widely accepted and where it's relatively easy to fornicate with women, fine. That can be good, but optimizing for marriage is not better when you're older. It's harder because there's a bigger age gap. It's harder because the most likely marriage candidates are often going to be taken as you get older, and it's harder because your experience of life changes, and the amount of time that you have to build a long enduring marriage just becomes much more difficult.

Then even the decision to marry becomes more difficult. If you marry when you're young, a lot of times as a man, you generally don't have that much money. If you are able to attract a high-quality woman, I think of it like that she's basically getting shares in a startup.

She is joining an enterprise that can be great rather than one that is great, and so she's getting shares in a startup. It's all about potential, who you might become as a man. She can affect you and influence you enormously. It is so powerful to have a woman who believes in you and a wife by your side, especially through those early years.

If you wait until you are older, number one, there's no guarantee that you'll be old and attractive. Some men have this idea. "When I'm 45 years old, I'm going to be a multimillionaire and have a six-pack and live on the beach, and I'm going to be dating Joshua's friend from college who's this beautiful 19-year-old girl." Okay, maybe.

But there's a decent chance that that doesn't work out at all. It's a decent chance that you're completely broke and you declared bankruptcy for the second time when you're 45 years old, and now you don't have any of those attractive qualities. But even if you do, even if you do have those attractive qualities, imagine yourself now as a 45-year-old man, multimillionaire, living on the beach, great shape.

You have access to any woman that you want to for a sexual relationship, but now you want to marry. Who are you going to marry? Are you going to marry a 45-year-old woman like you, who has a similar understanding of life and experience in life, but is unable to bear you any children or probably unable to bear you any children?

That doesn't seem super attractive. So now let's imagine, are you going to marry a 30-year-old woman who's 15 years younger than you are, but hey, maybe she can have some children and she's younger and that's okay because I'm older and she's younger. Well, maybe you will, but now what's your financial risk in marriage?

The first thing you're thinking about when you've got millions of dollars is, "Well, she's going to divorce me and take half my money and ruin it," and that's a genuine objection, a genuine problem. You come to me and I'm going to be talking to you about your prenup, but then are you so committed to marriage?

Is she so committed to marriage that it's no problem and it absolutely makes sense? And that's to say nothing of finding a 30-year-old that you even want to marry. If she's 30 years old and she's not married, it's because she either is not an attractive marriage candidate or she's not chosen to optimize for marriage.

So maybe she's lived the last 12 years of her legal adult life doing something else, but in 12 years, an attractive woman wasn't able to get married. An attractive woman who wants to marry, who's optimizing for marriage, can marry. And so what's wrong? Why was she not married? Why is she not?

So I'm going to go back to a 20-year-old and I'm going to marry a 20-year-old. Come on. You're 45 years old. You're going to marry a 20-year-old? For what? You have no shared culture, nothing in common. It's the strangest relationship. Oh, it's physical. Okay, fine, but it's weird. And why would a 20-year-old want to marry you, especially a marriage-minded 20-year-old, for something other than your money?

So don't fall into this false idea that somehow it's all going to be easier when I'm older and richer. It's not necessary to be rich to marry. And so if you weren't able to attract someone when you're younger, go back and figure out what it is. A younger woman who is marriage-minded is going to understand that you're not rich yet, but she can see ambition and she can see character and she can rate you on that stuff knowing where you're likely to wind up.

The fact that you're able to get rich at 45 is not generally a surprise to an insightful woman who stops and thinks about it. Does this guy have the characteristics that he's likely to do it? My point is there is a false idea that is going out there and people are saying, "Well, it's just going to be—for men especially—oh, it's easier when you're older." And again, there is an element of truth to it in that you may be more attractive when you are wealthy.

That is certainly something that is true, but that doesn't optimize for marriage. It may optimize for promiscuity and fornication, and that does not lead you to a happy life. Do you really want to go and trade places with Leonardo DiCaprio or Dan Bilzerian? Are these guys your role models of where you want to be at 45 years old or 50 years old?

Dating some 19-year-old model for three years and then sending her down the road to replace with another? I think there's an element in which we can all acknowledge that, "All right, well, that sounds kind of fun, I guess, but if you stop and listen to them, I'll play an audio here for you in a moment.

I was expecting this for a long time, but I finally got it from Bilzerian," and it just shows it. By the way, you can separate the money from the lifestyle. Would you rather be Pierce Brosnan, married to a woman for decades and have all of that shared life experience, or Leonardo DiCaprio, just a pathetic old man with lots of money continually cycling through and using young women?

Let me play you a clip that came out I think about a month ago, and I've expected this for a while, but it's interesting. This clip is important for us to listen to from some of these guys and understand you don't want to wind up like them. Minor parental warning here, this clip is a little bit vulgar, but it's important.

Here's just a clip from a recent podcast interview with Dan Bilzerian. How many women have you slept with in your life total? Thousands. Like Will Chamberlain levels? Not 20,000. 20,000 is a bit ambitious, but I mean, like I said, I was having sex with three girls a day on average at least at a minimum.

If I only had sex with two girls in a day, that was like we're having some real off day or something. Some days four, sometimes whatever, five, seven. The most was nine, but I don't know. It didn't really seem to matter that much. I don't know. Ten some, or ten some, I guess, you count yourself, ten some.

I don't know. I don't know. They're just waiting. It's just like having sex with one girl, they're just waiting. I don't know. There's a lot of obligation for you to have sex with nine girls. I had this image in my mind when I was growing up of how awesome this would be.

I don't know. What I kind of landed on was I think it's better to have a monogamous relationship. As strange as that is coming from me, because I think if ... You've got two choices. You can just do whatever you want and be free and allow the women to be free and just use condoms with all the girls and not care about if they hook up with other guys and it's just like purely sexual and whatever, or I think you can find a girl that you enjoy spending time with and that you actually trust each other.

I think it's hard to have that ... I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it's unlikely to find a woman that is going to be okay with you sleeping with other women that actually cares about you for the right reasons. It is possible. If you find a bisexual, very open, whatever, I'm not saying it's impossible.

It's very unlikely. I also think that even if the girl is okay with it, I think that you cause internal damage to her and I found that with Andrea and it didn't feel good to me, but like I said, I do think that one cool girl that does stuff with you that you actually have a mental connection with, I think the sex is better.

I think you're more relaxed. I think you have less things to deal with, less distractions. Your energy is not being pulled in a bunch of different directions. That's one of the complications of polyamory is the amount of logistics that you have to like if you're in relationship in some way, even if there's like a hierarchy to the polyamory, you have like six different schedules you have to manage.

You run a company. There's trying to do other things. It's draining. Yeah. Like you have to do like a lot. You have to do like 30 or 50 or 100 or whatever, or you have to ... I don't know. In my opinion, I think the one, but I really don't like the dynamic of three girls.

I think it's like guaranteed to cause competition. I don't think the girl's going to be happy. Maybe two could work if they were into each other, maybe, but then if you're just hanging out with one, the other one's just sitting there. I don't know. I haven't found too many dynamics that were super successful long term.

Short term, I have, but not for any like indefinite period of time. Don't take my opinion for it. Just understand. Again, not everyone, there are wackos who don't ever get introspective like Bilzerian, but they're sociopaths. And you don't want to be a sociopath, but all non-sociopaths that go down that pathway, that Bilzerian or DiCaprio or whatever, eventually they wind up in a similar situation.

What was the point? What was the point of this? But you don't see that reflected in other people. So in summary, don't be the guy who just says, "Well, it's going to be easier when I'm older and richer." It's not. It's never easier down the road. You don't want to marry poorly.

You don't want to marry a low quality woman. You don't want to marry the wrong woman. What you want to do is marry the right woman, a high quality woman at a young age, if possible. So you want to be serious about preparing yourself to be able to attract her at a young age and then move into marriage at a young age.

And if you can get both of those things right, you can choose a high quality woman because you were thoughtful and careful in your analysis and you chose someone that was optimized for marriage rather than optimized for some other factor. And you marry at a young age, that's when you get the best long-term outcomes.

So be serious about it and recognize that we don't want to get into a situation in which we feel pressure, "I just got to marry whoever's available." That's not the best long-term outcome. There are lies that are told to women consistently and repeatedly. The most common one that is happening right now is that there's always time, you always have time, you always have time, and that's simply not true.

And there are lies that are told to men and those lies are emerging. We need to combat them, both of them. And the way to optimize is as I have described, take it seriously, not obsessively, don't be a weirdo, but recognize that you can change yourself. You can optimize your personal qualities to be attractive to your ideal spouse candidate.

You can go out and you can interact with and meet many potential spouses in a forum or format that's appropriate for you and one of those relationships with a high-quality potential spouse can move towards marriage. Even though it may be difficult or more demanding in our current era and we need some kind of weird long two-hour and ten-minute podcast about it that we wouldn't have needed 80 years ago, it's still possible and it's still doable.

So I've done the podcast, now you have to do the hard work and I wish you well. I really do. I hope that it works. I want to see our culture optimize again towards preparing young people to be ready for marriage at a young age, build strong families that endure.

I want you to have a 70-year, an 80-year, a 90-year marriage. I want our children to see that and for us to establish that and create those kinds of long-enduring families rather than the kind of situations that we see around us. I hope that this has been a useful way for you to think through some of these issues.

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