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Go to LipsAndAds.com now, that's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets.

I'm your host and on today's podcast, I want to explore some of the traits, characteristics, and attributes that a wise and thoughtful and strategic young man or young woman could and should look for in a prospective spouse that are likely to be highly correlated with long-term financial productivity. In fact, I think highly causative of long-term financial productivity.

One of the things that's most interesting to me as we look at personal finance and we look at the world that we live in is we all understand that the person that you choose to marry makes an enormous difference in the quality of your life as well as objective long-term outcomes.

How long you live, how much wealth you have, we know that's true. We know that marriage is highly correlated with positive financial outcomes. Married people accumulate significantly more wealth than non-married people. They earn higher incomes. Basically every factor across society is higher for married people and significantly higher and this confounds even cohabitating couples who are not married.

They are not nearly as productive at creating and accumulating wealth as married people. So we understand that marriage is going to dramatically impact the long-term outcomes that you have in life and we understand that those outcomes are going to be financially measurable. On the most recent podcast, I shared with you some ideas on how to find and attract the spouse of your dreams and in a moment I'll tell you exactly why.

But there's a piece of content or advice that I myself have never come across in the world of personal finance and financial literature. And that line of thinking is simply what should you look for in a potential spouse that is likely to lead to your becoming wealthy together as a couple.

Now it may exist out there. I've not gone specifically looking for it. What I'm saying is that after a lifetime and a career of consuming personal finance literature and discussions, I've not come across anybody who's talked about this. And so I want to open the conversation up with some ideas on this.

To me, it seems obvious that we should talk about this. And I think I understand why we don't. After all, very few of us are strategic in pursuing marriage. It would be very unusual to have a handsome young 20-year-old guy who has a list of all of the things that if I just pursue these things and if my potential marriage candidate, the woman that I'm pursuing has these factors, then I'm definitely going to marry her.

But if she doesn't, I'm not. And it's very unusual for, first of all, any young person to be strategic about marriage and even more unusual for that person to be strategic in financial terms. After all, we would quickly, those of us with experience, we would quickly rush to diminish the importance of financial productivity in favor of other more compelling metrics of life satisfaction, such as happiness and contentment and peacefulness and other things.

And after all, we all recognize that it's probably better to be happy and content and satisfied with life and not financially wealthy than to be financially wealthy and not happy and content and satisfied with life. And there is a train of debate and discussion that happens on this. Simply does earning ability predict happiness and satisfaction?

Well, I think that these things are highly correlated and I don't think you have to choose one or the other. I think that you can be rich and be happy. It's not impossible. And so to say that would you choose to be rich or to be happy is a false dilemma.

And similarly to say would you choose a marriage that is financially productive or that leads to happiness and long-term success in life is a false dilemma. There's no reason to pull these things apart. We can recognize that both of them are important and we can recognize it while keeping priority.

So it would be similar to say is it possible to be virtuous or righteous and rich. It would be silly to say that you couldn't accomplish both of those things, but each man is going to have a different priority. You will say I'm going to choose to do the right thing regardless of whether it costs me because I believe that it's more important for me to be morally righteous than for me to be rich.

Another man would say I'm going to prioritize being rich because I'd rather be a rich scoundrel than a righteous pauper. So similarly it's a false choice to say that we can choose between a marriage relationship that is likely to lead to financial productivity or that's likely to lead to happiness.

Why not have a marriage relationship that is optimized for both of those things? And we can optimize and say that happiness is more important to me than financial productivity without saying that financial productivity is unimportant. And so if we're going to talk in the context of finance, we ought to at least start the conversation and discuss what are the factors that you should look for in a high quality, high value potential spouse that are likely to lead to the long-term outcome.

I think we know intuitively what some of those qualities are. It would be very unusual to find a beautiful, smart, attractive young woman who is not attracted to a man who has a high earning capacity. That would be a normal thing that happens in society that we all kind of naturally understand.

But there's a lot more to it than just well he makes a lot of money. And so I think we should talk about these factors and consider them and consider what we should optimize for and how we should go about it. And I understand that most people are not strategic in pursuing a developing marriage.

I wasn't. Most of us aren't. Most of us kind of just end up in a situation that we're in and sometimes we're happy with it, sometimes we're not. But just because people in the past weren't strategic doesn't mean that no one was strategic. And just because perhaps many people were not strategic in the past doesn't mean that you shouldn't be strategic today or that your children shouldn't be strategic.

After all, one of the great challenges that is different in this year than perhaps some decades back is that we formerly had a strong marriage culture, at least in the culture that I'm from, the Western tradition from the United States of America personally but across broadly Western culture. We formerly had a strong marriage culture that made strategy unnecessary for most people.

But that culture is gone. The culture that we live in is not facilitating marriage. Young people are not connecting with one another, they're not dating one another, they're not having sexual relationships with one another. And when they are having sexual relationships and dating one another, those relationships are not automatically leading to marriage.

The relationships that do lead to marriage are not automatically leading to children. So those of us who are older have to roll up our sleeves and get involved and try to figure out what do we do differently. And even if it's hopeless for, let's say, a 30-year-old guy or gal today, it's not hopeless for my children, and it's not hopeless for your children, and it's not hopeless for the 30-year-old guy or gal today either.

So just because our culture is gone doesn't mean that you and I can't employ strategy in the face of cultural opposition to get the long-term outcomes that stable marriages and productive marriages entail. And what I'm trying to do in this series is I'm trying to bring open the discussion in your own mind so that you can think about what you agree with, what you appreciate, what you don't, as always, take what's useful, discard the rest.

But I want you to make you think about what you want and what you envision, and I want you to think long-term so that you have strategic foundation for your decisions, not just being ruled by your emotions. And I want you to develop options. One of the reasons I spent so much time in the previous episode talking about a framework to develop your own attractiveness, basically, is to help you develop options.

One reason very few young men and women are strategic in who they would pursue for marriage is that most people just don't have that many options. It's very unusual for a young man or woman to be sitting back with five potential marriage candidates and be strategically assessing, "Well, let's see.

Candidate number one has a cumulative score of 87 points, and candidate number two is 84.3 points. What kind of tiebreaker could I employ between candidates one and two?" That's not how life works. Normally, you just have an option that comes along at a point in your life in which you're thinking about it, and you're open to it, and boom, you move forward.

And I'm not opposed to that. I think that's okay. But for a young man or woman who has options, is that the best way to go about it? Now we can find this most effectively in literature, usually from the female perspective. If we go back and we read many works of literature, and we find a very attractive woman, or in some cases a very attractive man with an annual income of $19,000, if we find an attractive man or woman, there will be a variety of people who are interested in that man or woman.

And of course, there's some love story that ensues to where the person finds ultimately true love. And so my point is to articulate that, because when I was a teenager, nobody spoke to me seriously in the way that I will speak to my sons and sons seriously and say, "Listen, you need to maximize your attractiveness and your value in all dimensions in order for you to have the chance of attracting a high-quality spouse." Nobody did that.

And so I just didn't... I never thought about it. And it seems obvious to say it, but I never thought about it. And so if I never thought about it, I figure there's probably two or three other guys in the world who haven't thought about it, two or three other girls in the world that haven't thought about it.

And in today's world, what I see is that a lot of people aren't thinking about it even in terms of spousal attraction. There's an enormous conflict happening among young people today who are not married, where they're optimizing for sexual appeal and sexual activity and relationships that are not leading to marriage rather than optimizing for marriage.

And we see clearly where that goes and the toxic culture that it creates for young men and women. And so we have to find other strategies. So forgive me for a very long intro, but this really, really matters. And I want to provide you... I want to at least stimulate your thinking to think about, "If I want to be rich and if I'm going to get married, then what should I look for?" The spouse that you marry will do three important things, will have three important impacts on your financial future.

First, your spousal selection will enormously impact your immediate and long-term financial future on the positive side, meaning your income, the money that you make, the investments that you earn, the trajectory of your career. Your spousal selection can make a huge difference on that. Let's go through those for just a moment.

Obviously, the most glaring example is what income does my spouse earn? If you are a young woman and you marry a man who is earning $50,000 a year and doesn't have much potential beyond cost of living raises in his life, as compared to a man who is in a highly paid career or on a highly paid career trajectory and has a potential to earn $500,000 a year, there's going to be an obvious difference in your long-term wealth based upon that selection between those potential husbands.

So the income is direct and clear. But there's a more important in terms of a career trajectory for all of us. Let's say that you're a young man and you're married to a woman who complements your career choice or a woman who you're constantly fighting with in your career choice.

This can take many different expressions. It can take an expression in terms of where you need to live for your couple, for both of your incomes, how you need to approach it, how much she wants you to come home from work early because that's where she is versus how much she supports you working late, working on the weekends, going for it, taking risks, living small and frugally so that you can accumulate investment capital.

These things are enormously impactful long-term and it's the relational dynamics that make a big, big difference. So enormously impact to your short and long-term financial future on the positive side is going to be determined based upon the specific person that you marry. Now we can flip it to the negative side.

The spouse that you marry is going to enormously impact your long-term financial future on the negative side. The big one is risk of divorce. You may lose a decade of financial productivity. If you marry somebody, you're in it for a decade and then there's a divorce and all of a sudden your net worth is destroyed.

You lose several years of productive work that are now spent fighting in divorce court. It's enormously disruptive. But also then on the expense side, the expenses that are associated with this particular person that you marry are going to be enormously impactful. And then the third aspect is the really long-term financial future of your descendants in terms of genetics, of your children, the way that your children are brought up, the culture that your children have, they're enormously important.

And careful spousal selection is the magic key to solving all three of these things because none of these are random factors that just happen to you. In a moment or in the middle of this show, I will relate to you some stories of a marriage researcher and his story is that he can predict divorce with 91% reliability, whether a couple will stay married or whether a couple will divorce.

And it's just an example to show that there are things that you can look for in any situation to know how likely you are to divorce. All the signs are there as to is this person that I'm likely to marry or that I want to marry, is this person likely to be a dog walker or a doctor?

The signs are all there from an early age and so you're not wrong to look for these things. Remember, I think you can and should be extremely picky prior to marriage. Once you're married, then you're all in on marriage, but you should be very picky prior to marriage. And you, with this decision of the person that you're going to marry, you, as in no other decision, you deserve to be entirely selfish about your decisions.

Now, why don't people do that? Well, they don't think about it and they don't develop themselves to be able to attract a very high quality spouse and it's not surprising. Most people who are unmarried, it's not surprising that they're unmarried if you have a little bit of experience in life and you just look and understand, well, it's not, duh, of course this person's not married.

What does he bring to the table? What does she bring to the table? What is he doing? What is she doing with her time? Who is she meeting? And as I described in detail in the previous episode, it's a function of what are you looking for? Do you know that?

Have you optimized your personal traits of attractiveness so that you can attract the people that you want to attract and repel the people that you want to repel? And then have you been invested into going and finding the kinds of places where people are that are likely to be in a relationship with you?

It's not magic. It's a math formula based upon what you're looking for and it should be relatively normal for an attractive young man or an attractive young woman to have a few options. And that's not abnormal where you see the proof, the evidence of this most starkly in today's world is just look at the options that a beautiful woman or a very highly developed, high value man has in the dating marketplace.

This young man or woman has many options to choose among and it's that balance between recognizing okay, some things are innate but not everything is innate and a young man or woman can develop himself or herself to be attractive, to have multiple options and that puts you in a different situation.

And you should be very picky about what you are looking for in a prospective partner. Then when you marry, be all in on marriage. So I'm trying to help you to think about what I want you to have options by engaging in sufficient levels of personal development, developing your own attractive qualities that would be attractive to your ideal spouse and then doing that young enough so you don't have your back up against the wall.

You're 30 years old, now all of a sudden you're going to get serious about life, well that's probably not the best time to do it. You don't want to have your back up against the wall, you want to really be doing this early so that you have time and you can patiently look and think beyond just the short term, you know, I feel good when I'm with him or whatever the short term things are.

You need to become a person of value who brings something to the table so that you can attract a high quality, high value spouse. Now what should you look for? Well, I'd like to characterize what you should look for into three different categories because I think it's useful for analysis and I'm not going to give you a comprehensive list.

I just want to stimulate your thinking so that you can make your own list. But I think if we characterize these things on different levels, then we'll understand, we'll be able to develop in the fullness of time a more comprehensive list. Some of the traits that you should look for in a potential marriage partner are genetic and they're genuinely physically genetic traits.

Some are long term traits that are not quite genetic but that are very, very enduring in terms of their impact. The kind of childhood that somebody had is not necessarily a genetic trait on the physical level. But yet it has enduring influence and will probably affect this person's view and outlook on life for the rest of his or her life.

And then some traits are relatively easily changed and they're skills that can be attracted and developed. For example, let's say that your initial response to when I say what should you look for in a spouse to enhance your financial future, you might say something like, "I want to marry someone who's good with money." Okay, great.

But what does that mean? Does that mean skilled at budgeting? You want to marry somebody who's skilled at budgeting? I don't think much of that because that's a skill that can be learned in six weeks to six months. It's not that hard to develop a skill at budgeting. You can be done with that in six weeks to six months.

Or do you mean by I want to marry someone who's good with money, I want to marry someone who earns a million dollars a year? Well, earning a million dollars a year is a skill that is usually going to take, I would say, at least a minimum of a decade to develop.

I don't know anybody who's done it in less than a decade and often much, much longer. Sometimes that's multiple decades and there's so many underlying skills that are necessary to earn a million dollars a year. So which of those things do you mean when you say I want to marry someone who's good with money?

Again, I would be happy if I'm going to choose somebody – if I clearly recognize that earning a million dollars a year is more important than being good at budgeting $40,000 a year, then I need to figure out what's the environment, what are the skill sets that put someone on the 10-year path to earning a million dollars a year.

That's the key thing to optimize for. The budgeting can be fixed pretty easily. So we'll look at some positive traits to look for. Now, there's one more question I want to talk through and the question is should this be a conversation that is sex specific? Should this be a conversation where I say husbands, here's what you should look for in potential wives and potential wives, here's what you should look for in potential husbands, or should I use the inclusive term of spouse?

I'm not opposed to sexism generally. I'm a man. I enjoy spending my time with men. I don't really spend time with women. I'm a five-woman man. I've got a wife, I've got a daughter, I've got a mother, and I've got two sisters. That's about most of the women that I spend time with in my life.

And I enjoy my life that way. And the audience of Radical Personal Finance is predominantly male. But I don't think that this conversation is one where we should automatically be sex-specific in how we talk about and what we do and how we deal with things. I think that it's hard in our current very androgynous age, it's hard to determine where the lines should be drawn, but there are lines that need to be drawn.

And I think that some marriage strategies are the same for men and women and some are different. In addition though, we need to go beyond marriage and recognize that your strategy will be different depending on whether you're optimizing for marriage or whether you're optimizing for reproduction and long-term family vitality, as in children and grandchildren.

Because these things are two different things. I'm going to be talking about marriage, but in the back of your mind, because that's what I've titled my show, but in the back of your mind you need to distinguish between marriage and long-term family formation. And it's important that you understand that there is a somewhat robust circle of social -- I hate to use the word "science" for social science, but I don't know another word -- social science that we can look at.

We can look at some data, we can look at some studies, some analysis, and try to form some opinions that are informed by data and research in this area. But you probably don't need the research. What you probably need to do is just simply be willing to confirm your bias, be willing to confirm your natural knowledge of the world.

Because we've all seen how relationships naturally function in our life. So let's talk about, for example, a male doctor marrying versus a female doctor. And with this we'll introduce a couple of terms that are important to think about. So first, let's say you have an equally qualified male doctor, female doctor, high income earning, high status profession, huge amounts of intelligence needed, huge amounts of grit, some of the factors that are highly correlated with positive financial expectativity.

So we could see that a male doctor can be attracted to and happily marry a female doctor. This happens all the time. A male doctor can be attracted to and happily marry a female doctor. The male doctor can be attracted to and happily marry a female school teacher. But it's unlikely that a female doctor, it's unlikely for a female doctor to marry a male school teacher.

And it's not just in terms of exposure. It's not just in terms of, well, they didn't meet each other because they were in different schools. There is an element of that. But there's something deeper related to it. The first trend that we clearly see across society is the trend of homogamy.

Homogamy is defined in the social sciences, the marriage between individuals who are in some culturally important way similar to each other. It's a form of assortative mating. And the marriage union can be based on similarity of socioeconomic status, class, gender, caste, ethnicity, or religion, or age in age homogamy.

So these are all expressions of homogamy. I'm reading directly from the Wikipedia article on homogamy here. Now we would contrast homogamy with heterogamy. So homogamy, similarities, and heterogamy, differences from one another. So in sociology, heterogamy refers to a marriage between two individuals that differ in a certain criterion, including all of those that I just listed.

Very common expressions of heterogamy in today's world would be age heterogamy, so partners marrying at disparate ages, ethnic heterogamy, partners of different ethnicities marrying, and of course social class and all of these things are relevant to it. You have, what was that old movie, The Businessman Marries the Prostitute.

These kinds of things are always the substance of literature and discussion and we love them. And so what you see if you think about homogamy and heterogamy is you can see that we're simultaneously attracted to both of these things. There's a reason that in, again, if you don't have this in your life, you can find it in literature.

There's a reason why people marry someone of our class or of our culture or of our religion. There's a reason also that we simultaneously have an appreciation and a fixation with the wealthy guy marrying the poor girl, the prince marrying the servant girl, the businessman marrying the prostitute, the people of Romeo and Juliet from different families.

There's all this fascination with this integration with people similar to each other and different from each other. And these are important because some people and some factors are very important to marriage. Some factors are less important to marriage. Some factors are very important to reproduction and some factors are less important to reproduction.

Now we have our first our discussion of homogamy. Now similarly we can then move to a different term and the term is hypergamy. Hypergamy, what we would refer to in non-clinical terms as dating up or marrying up, is a term that is used for a person who dates or marries a spouse of a higher social status or sexual capital than that individual person.

And the antonym for hypergamy would be hypogamy and these are the basic balancing between them. The experience that men and women have for hypergamy or hypogamy is different. I can demonstrate this to you by just looking at popular cultures. What is usually the case is that men are not particularly concerned with the social class or the earning ability or some external feature of a woman that they're attracted to.

Men tend to not necessarily be hypergamous. That doesn't mean that they want to be married to a woman who is very dissimilar to them. So that's why we don't talk about hypogamy. Nobody really wants to be married to somebody who is dissimilar. What it means is that men aren't generally pursuing somebody of a higher class or status as a very important part of their life.

And again I would go back to pretty woman. Here you have the wealthy successful businessman who is attracted to the prostitute who has made a series of unfortunate decisions but at her inner being she has a heart of gold and of course somehow she's going to make him mad, make him happy because of who she is and so he pursues her and attracts her and marries her.

That would be pretty woman. What you don't generally see is the opposite. You don't generally see any, I couldn't name any movies, where there's an incredibly attractive, successful, beautiful woman who then goes and marries a male dud with no prospects. When you see this reflected in popular culture you wind up with movies that are more like the movie The Proposal.

So in The Proposal you have Sandra Bullock who is a high-powered editor and high-powered businesswoman and all of a sudden she decides, she finds out she's going to be kicked out of the United States and be deported to Canada unless she has a relationship. So in a fit of desperation she goes after her poorly paid assistant and says, "Well actually, you're going to be my fiancé." And basically she manipulates and coerces him into being her fiancé.

But then of course in the long run they wind up madly in love and together. Well why? Well what it turns out that her fiancé, though he had a low-paying job, was actually from a wealthy elite family in Alaska where they basically owned half of the Alaskan town that they were from.

And you know he's actually a really high-quality guy. So even though the initial indications of her status in life were different, even though he was her assistant and a lowly paid lackey, in reality he's actually this really fabulous amazing guy and this temporary and wealthy and sophisticated and accomplished, but in this temporary low point in his life of being an assistant was just part of a strategic desire to find himself.

And so you can see this throughout our culture and there's good data done on this. You're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipsyn ads.

Go to Lipsyn ads dot com now. That's L I B S Y N ads dot com. There's been various studies in the social studies that across people, across culture, men and women approach relationships differently and they look for different things. And so there is an element of sex specificity that is necessary because the competitive strategies for men are different than the competitive strategies for women.

Women can optimize for features such as high income, high status, high power, but they're less important than optimizing for other features because men are looking for different things than wives and wives are looking for husbands. And so some of the big problems that we face though in our current society is that the traditional ways in which these were facilitated for and structured for, some of them are working better than ever designed and some of them are working worse than ever designed.

So homogamy as an example, right now in our current culture we have more and more homogamous relationships than ever before. And the homogamy though is primarily related to intellectual ability and which for which we can use education as the proxy. I first started thinking about this maybe a decade ago when I read Charles Murray's book called Coming Apart and that was where I first met the word homogamy.

And what we see is simply that our society, the whole thesis of coming apart which I think is continuing as best I can tell, is simply that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer but it's not just in financial terms, it's basically in every terms.

Our societies are becoming more and more intensely segregated, not based upon skin color necessarily, not based upon wealth necessarily, but based upon all of the features related to it. And a big one is intelligence and in terms of relationships, intelligence is an enormous element of the long-term future of our society as well as your own children.

So let me read a short passage from my copy of Coming Apart. Before the age – this is from a section titled The Increase in Cognitive Homogamy. Before the age of mobility, people commonly married someone from the same town or from the same neighborhood of an urban area. The events that threw people together seldom had anything to do specifically with cognitive ability.

Similar cognitive ability was a source of compatibility between a young man and a young woman and some degree of cognitive homogamy existed, but it was a haphazard process. Meanwhile, educational homogamy was high because hardly anyone went to college. In large proportions of married couples, both had less than a high school education or both had a high school diploma.

As the proportion of college graduates increased, so did the possibilities for greater educational homogamy at the top. As college graduates found, they had more potential marriage partners who were also college graduates. Drawing on the extensive technical literature and the CPS, sociologists Christine Schwartz and Robert Marr examined trends in assortative marriage as it was known in the jargon from 1940 to 2003.

They found that homogamy has increased at both ends of the educational scale. College graduates grew more likely to marry college graduates and high school dropouts grew more likely to marry other high school dropouts. For our purposes, trying to understand how the new upper class came to be, the effects of increased educational attainment may be seen in a simple measure.

In 1960, just 3% of American couples both had a college degree. By 2010, that proportion stood at 25%. The change was so large that it was a major contributor to the creation of a new class all by itself. But increased educational homogamy had another consequence that the academic literature on homogamy avoids mentioning.

Increased educational homogamy inevitably means increased cognitive homogamy. A college education starting with admission and continuing through to graduation is a series of cognitive tests. To be able even to begin a major in engineering or the hard sciences, students have to be able to do advanced calculus and that in turn requires logical mathematical ability and roughly the top decile of the population.

To be able to cope with genuine college level material in the social sciences and humanities requires good linguistic ability and the top quartile of the distribution, if you're content with scraping by, closer to the top decile if you want to get good grades in a moderately demanding college. To graduate means passing all these tests plus a general test for perseverance.

We'll call that grit. We'll come back to grit later. The result is that each level of educational attainment, high school diploma, AA, BA, MA, and professional degree or PhD, implies a mean IQ for people attaining that level that has been remarkably stable among whites at least since the beginning of the 1980s.

I must limit the numbers to whites as I present these data because aggressive affirmative action has produced means for African Americans and Latinos at each level of educational attainment that are substantially lower and more variable than the white means. But since we are talking about the new upper class, there are good reasons to think in terms of the white means, partly because African Americans and Latinos who enter the new upper class have passed a number of career tests signifying that they approximate the white means on cognitive ability for each level of educational attainment.

And partly because the new upper class is still overwhelmingly white. Table 2.1 shows the evidence for these stable means. And let me just read you table 2.1. And I'll use the 1982 to 1989 data. So the mean IQ for the table is titled mean white IQ for levels of degree attainment in the NLSY-79 and NLSY-97.

So the mean IQ for persons completing no more than no degree is 88. For persons completing no more than a high school diploma or GED is 99. For persons completing no more than an associate's degree is 105. Bachelor's degree 113 IQ, master's degree 117, PhD, LLD, MD, DDS is 126.

Now we'll come back to the transmission of cognitive ability to the next generation in a moment. The point, however, is that our society is sorting itself on many, many features. And these features are important. And this homogamy, that even though there is a tendency to say, "Oh, we don't care about being the same.

After all, we don't care about ethnic differences among couples. We don't care necessarily about age disparities. You do you. You like who you like, etc." There's this intense homogamy that is happening in our society based upon the way that our society is now sorted and structured by educational institutions, careers, things like that.

And then that's mixed with the natural hypergamy or lack of hypergamy between men and women that is creating enormous pressure on young people and their mate selection. And so these features and attributes need to be thought through, need to be understood if we're going to give people good advice.

So let's get to the advice. What should you look for? Let's begin at the genetic level. Let's begin with those traits that you should look for in a potential partner that are going to impact your life, your wealth production, and your children. And let's start with those ones that are largely unalterable, which is what I'm calling the genetic traits.

The first one that you need to look for is good health and longevity. And let me repeat for the 15th time. You're listening to me in the comfort of your own ears. That means, generally speaking, you're consuming my podcast in a private space. Don't let anyone shame you and say that somehow you shouldn't be looking for the highest quality spouse that you can attract.

I'm saying this to you because I never would have believed it if I'd heard myself, if I've heard this advice when I was younger. I would have seen myself as some kind of white knight to say, "Oh no, you know, I shouldn't have high standards of the person that I want to marry.

I shouldn't have requirements and even basic fundamental genetic requirements. I should accept all people the way that they are." The problem with that is that real life happens. And when real life happens, you start to understand that these basic features and characteristics that the partner that you marry has enormously impact your life.

And so it sounds enormously selfish for me to say to a young unmarried man or a young unmarried woman, you should look for a potential marriage partner who has robust health. After all, all of us have friends who do not enjoy robust health. All of us know people who don't enjoy robust health and all of us want desperately to help those people.

We want our friends who are unhealthy to get healthy. We don't want to express the concept that I'm just going to not pick you because you're unhealthy. We would never say that out loud and you don't have to say it out loud. That's why the fact that you're listening to me in the comfort of your ears and the privacy of your own mind, you don't ever have to say any of this stuff to anybody out loud.

Nobody can judge you for the decisions you make, although you'll feel the pressure. We live in a world in which, well, you can't judge me for whether I marry a man or a woman. You can't judge me for the kind of person that I'm attracted to or not attracted to, but yet you are facing enormous judgment if you say, "I'm only going to marry somebody who is healthy." And yet what I'm telling you is that these things, if you're young, they matter.

And this is a cumulative set of factors. These are a cumulative set of factors that you will have to choose. But for every factor that you, what I'll call compromise on, what I mean is for every factor that on a scale of one to 10, you choose somebody who scores low on this factor, it's going to impact your life enormously.

If you marry somebody who is healthy, then the ease of your marriage, the ease of your finances are likely to be enormous. Someone has a strong immune system, they're not susceptible to chronic diseases, they've got good overall physical fitness. Just everything's easy and simple in that element of your married life.

On the other hand, you marry someone who's sick all the time, and now the pressure that puts upon your marriage is significant. If you marry someone, you make a vow to be with them in sickness and in health, for better or worse, for richer and for poorer. So once you are married to someone, you come to me and you say, "Hey, Joshua, you know, my husband or wife is sick all the time.

What do I do?" I'm going to be standing in front of you saying, "You absolutely have to support this person. This is your wife. This is your husband that we're dealing with. You owe this person a duty of care." And though that duty of care bankrupts you because you are paying for medical care, though you can't work because you're a full-time caregiver or whatever the situation is, I'm going to honor you for your faithfulness to your husband or wife in their time of sickness.

But prior to marriage, you have a choice, and it is smart for you to be as discriminating as you possibly can with your choices prior to marriage. Now the flip side of this is simply the fact that there is a limit to the kind of person that you are going to be able to attract into a marriage relationship with you.

If you are a 2, you're going to have a very difficult time attracting a 10 into a relationship with you. So if health is a component of what you would rate someone on, then, and you're a 2, you're probably going to be marrying a 1, a 2, or a 4.

You're not going to be marrying a 10. So you have a choice. Either I'm willing to transform myself from a 2 to a 10 and do everything I can in other factors that I can control in order to attract a very high-quality spouse, or I'm going to settle for somebody who is closer to my age.

Settling is not a negative concept. Everyone settles at some point in time for some reason. People who don't settle are single for the rest of their life. But there's a lot you can do to prepare yourself. That's why I spent so much energy in the previous episode to try to make this point, that you can change yourself.

You can go from a 2 to a 7, and then you'll have access to people who are a good match for you. And so you want to change those things that you can change. You may be able to change your health, but even if you can't change your health, there's a lot of other things that you can change, and what you'll see is that people who don't have robust health, if they'll give attention and focus to developing their other qualities, they can still attract a very, very high-quality prospective spouse.

You see this all the time with people who are profoundly handicapped and yet have attracted a very high-quality spouse because they've developed other qualities. So I'm sorry it's so long, but I think of myself at a younger age when I make my podcasts, and I would have been, in my own mind, a guy who was willing to be a white knight.

I would have been a guy who was willing to say, "Oh, well, here's this wonderful girl, and after all, if I marry her, I can help her," right? And in hindsight, with the perspective of more than a decade of marriage and five children and everything that that involves, while I'm still young enough to remember being that guy, I look at it now and I realize no one ever told me how important it was to be entirely selfish with my selection of a spouse.

And I owe a good amount of the success and happiness of my marriage to me having some filters that were cultural filters built in, as well as just to God's providence, His blessings on my life. I wasn't as strategic as I could have been and probably should have been, but once you're in it, you're in it.

So you deserve to be selfish in your thinking and write down exactly what you want, but then you also have to develop and cultivate the traits and attributes that are going to be able to attract someone. So forgive the lengthy sidebar there, but it's really important that young people understand you can be selfish and you should be selfish about this as much as anything else.

You should be selfish about working in the kind of career that you want to work in, about marrying the kind of person that you want to marry. You should be selfish about these things. But you can't be selfish in a non-deserving way. You can't say, "Well, I deserve to be a doctor," and not be willing to put in the really, really long years of work to develop yourself and the really long road to build the skills and pass the exams and pass the classes and get the degrees.

If you want to be a doctor, go for it. But you prove that you deserve being a doctor with your work. Similarly, you can't say, "Well, I just want to marry a 10, and I'm a 2, but I just deserve a 10." Okay, well, if you're going to deserve a 10, you're going to have to transform yourself from a 2 to a 7, and you're going to have to work really, really hard to market yourself effectively until you convince the 10 to be with you.

And that's going to take you some time and a whole lot of work. So I hope that's helpful. Back to the list, what are the genetic traits that we should be screening for? Well, big one is good health and separately longevity, which is related to health but not determinative of it.

You want to look for a partner with a robust genetic predisposition to good health, and you should assess that and look for something that is likely to... and screen for somebody who is healthy. If your partner is healthy, then he or she is going to be able to enjoy a more active lifestyle with you, you're going to have lower healthcare costs, you're going to be able to earn more money because you can work consistently.

If you ever get sick, you have understood, especially if you're sick for more than a few days, you understand how impossible it is to be financially productive when you're sick all the time. A huge portion of our ability to earn money just comes from just the natural attribute of feeling good, feeling strong, being able to go to work and be effective on a day to day basis.

And when somebody gets sick, mentally sick, physically sick, everything falls apart. And a lot of that stuff is predetermined by genetics. And so you want to screen for that. How do you screen for health? Well, I think first you should screen for what you know about, just knowledge of health conditions.

If you are, let's say, getting to know somebody and that person, you find out that person has some significant illness or chronic disease, then you should take that into account. And that might be something that you say, "Okay, this is not for me because of this chronic disease." You should trust your own basic instincts related to health as well.

I think that one thing that Dr. Katherine Shanahan, the author of the book Deep Nutrition convinced me of is that various aspects of what we call beauty can be considered as markers for health. Beauty, which is often related to symmetry, has a strong genetic component related to it. And if you're interested in that discussion, read Dr.

Katherine Shanahan's book called Deep Nutrition where she discusses it extensively. She may have published other things on it. That's just where I came up with it. But in general, we are attracted to various markers of beauty as being related to someone who is healthy. For example, let's say that somebody has a highly symmetrical face and body.

We're likely to say, "Hey, that person is really beautiful because of the symmetry of his or her face and his or her body. That person is really beautiful." That's related, however, to genetic health. We can go more to that. Let's say that somebody has beautiful skin. Open up any advertisement for a skincare product and you'll see a model with beautiful skin.

Beautiful skin, clear skin, skin that is not encumbered by acne or other issues and I don't even know what words to say because I'm not knowledgeable enough. But clear and beautiful skin, a healthy complexion, these are markers of good health. If you see a sick person, if you see somebody that has boils or a rash or pustules of some kind or acne or white skin or a wand complexion or kind of greasiness or sliminess or something like that, these are expressions of sickness.

This is the way that sick people look. So the beauty of someone's skin is related to health and most of it has to come from inside. And so if someone is constantly covering up, I think women are prone to this, someone's constantly covering up her skin, make sure you get a chance to see your skin au naturel rather than constantly covered with beauty products that may be concealing some expression of sickness.

If you are, let's say you're dealing with a sick and ailing actor or public person, maybe someone has been sick, a politician is sick and you've got to go on television to show how strong and competent he is, he's going to be spending a lot of time in front of the makeup artist before being put on TV.

And so makeup can be used to hide things and you should be filtering and saying is this person physically beautiful, have physical attraction. Similarly, the way that somebody moves is an indication of health. Somebody who's athletic, athleticism is related and correlated to health and balanced movement, strong muscles, strong bones, functional joints, coordination.

Athletes generally are athletes because they're healthy and so you can screen for health based upon athleticism and expression of athleticism. Back to family history, you should also think about the longevity that somebody has related to family history. I always came from a long-lived parents and it wasn't until I was older I started doing financial counseling and I had clients who told me they didn't expect to live past 60 and I never understood it because all my ancestors died at a hundred or at least in mid to late nineties and so the idea in my mind is always okay I'm going to live to a hundred, it's just how old we are.

And then I met people and I understood, wait a second, this person, like this is not, this was not me saying somehow well you're going to die soon. This is an unbidden, unprompted expression that as to a man's financial planner that yeah I'm probably not going to live past 60 because in my family we all die in our fifties and sixties.

Think about the difference in wealth and expectations of life of marrying somebody whose family history would indicate that this person is unlikely to live past 60 as compared to someone who's likely to live to a hundred. Think about the extra 20 or 30 decades of earning that perhaps a man who's likely lived to a hundred has over somebody who's likely to live to 50.

Think about your position as a wife who is marrying this man and think about him saying I'm not going to live past 60 so I'm going to retire at 45 and I'm going to start spending money because after all I want to spend money. And he's going to die at 60 and you might be, you know, a woman coming in likely to die at 90 statistically speaking when you're going to live a lot longer than men.

So how do you plan for that financially as compared to a husband who expects to die at a hundred and he's going to work and earn income until he's say 80 and then he's going to retire for 10 or 15, 20 years and just the amount of money earned in a lifetime is enormous and also the long-term thinking that someone can have when he or she is investing say an extra decade of his life at an early age to have a high earning ability knowing that he has plenty of time to earn it out.

Think about your wife dying at 50 years old and now all of a sudden what do you do as a man? Are you going to go and marry someone else? Are you going to be single for the rest of your life? That's really hard as compared to growing old with the wife of your youth and not having to worry about that and think about that.

So longevity of family history is something to think about and understand what it is. Important to both of these though we shouldn't just focus on what is inherited because things that are inherited can be overcome. So think about the propensity that your proposed marriage candidate has to correct health weaknesses.

All right well my parents all died of heart attacks but is this the kind of guy who is likely to say well my parents all died of heart attacks so I'm just going to never see a cardiologist or is this the kind of guy who says my parents all died of heart attacks so I'm going to be seeing a cardiologist every six months.

You understand the point that just because you may have gotten a bad genetic inheritance from your family doesn't mean that you're stuck with that bad genetic inheritance for life. Is this person someone who's eating differently, exercising differently to develop the athletic ability to develop these things? Is this a person who's interested in topics that are related to health and longevity?

No individual factor that I'm talking about should be seen as necessarily disqualifying. There are only a few factors that I would say if one of my children came to me and said hey dad you know I'm considering this person as a husband or a wife, what do you think?

There are only a few basic factors that I would say absolutely not. On the other hand most of these are kind of a mushy gooey let's think about this and let's analyze all right here's a negative factor, you know here's a positive factor, this is highly correlated to success, this is highly correlated to failure.

Let's dig into these factors on a deeper level in order to understand how to respond to them and then each for each factor you look for the response. So okay well this girl you know she's not the most beautiful and the reason for her beauty is ABC but you know what, she's adapted to that and she's figured out how to dress in a way that is really enhances her beauty and she has really dialed in on a lifestyle that leads to this being her incredibly robust health and man she's healthier than anyone I know even if she's not the most beautiful.

And that kind of girl would probably be much more attractive than the girl who's just quote unquote naturally beautiful, never worked for it, never tried for it, just automatically received it but yet shows no interest in maintaining her health, stuffing her face with bad food all the time, not enhancing what basic characteristics she has because we know that in 20 years the direction that that girl is on is going to be very different than the direction that the girl who didn't have the natural advantages and had to work to develop her advantages.

And so we're looking to see does this person have a propensity to correct health weaknesses, does this person have an interest in topics related to health and longevity but you need to screen for health because health is a big big deal. Similarly big genetic trait to look for is going to be intelligence.

I think you need to seek a spouse who has a strong basis for intelligence, a strong genetic basis for intelligence and with someone with whom you share a similar level of intelligence. I have a hard time being with the idea even of being married to somebody who is not my equal in terms of intelligence and intellectual ability.

That would be very unfulfilling and I think that people dramatically underestimate this. Now I don't know how to solve basically the long-term cultural problem of homogamy in terms of separation among our classes, I don't know how to solve that. All I know is that when you're going into marriage you want to be with somebody who is your intellectual equal, you want to be with somebody that you respect, you don't want to marry somebody who is dumb and he can't understand you.

Intelligence is highly correlated with earning potential, long-term career prospects, the ability to engage in wise financial decision-making, it's highly correlated with all of these things and with just long-term success and so if you are an intelligent man or intelligent woman you should be looking to marry an intelligent man or an intelligent woman and that will make everything easier.

I have a hard time knowing how, I don't interact very much with people of low intelligence and most of our societies result in the fact that most of us don't interact with people of differing intelligence from us because we kind of get funneled into schools, we get funneled into colleges, we get funneled into jobs and professions that are good equal for us.

Unless you have a business or the kind of profession that enables you to interact with people of differing intellectual ability, you just spend your time with people who are like you, we all do and people who can understand what you have to talk about because after all one of the basics of good human relationships is that you enjoy spending time with people who like to talk about the kinds of things you like to talk about.

And so I just didn't ever go out of my way, I never spent much time with people who were not very smart and as I got older I realized this accounts for a lot of the frustration that you have. You try to explain something and I generally expect that if I'm going to, if someone's going to explain something to me I get one time and I better understand it and I take the same thing the other way.

If I'm going to take my time to explain something to you, I'm going to explain it one time and you need to get it. Well, people who are not very smart don't generally function that way. They need something to be explained multiple times. That's enormously frustrating for me and I don't know when it was but my eyes were open a number of years ago and I realized, wait a second Joshua, sometimes you're judging people for character deficiencies and in reality that's an entirely wrong judgment.

Just understand that not all people have the same basic ability and we need to respect that and understand that and what happens is that we do a pretty decent job of this from the physical perspective. If we see that someone is old or infirm or handicapped in some physical way then we automatically adapt and adjust to that person.

I'm going to walk a little slower, I'm going to offer you my arm, I'm going to do something to adapt and we do it with proper respect. We don't look down on somebody because this person has a differing physical capacity than I do. We don't look down on them, we just naturally adapt to one another and it's going to result in...

our lives are going to result in segregation in some contexts. If somebody is physically handicapped sitting in a wheelchair then he's going to be sitting on the side of the sports field while those who are not physically handicapped are playing on the sports field but that doesn't mean that there's not a place for that person in society.

We're going to respect and appreciate that person, we're going to celebrate him for what he can do, for the things that he can contribute. One of the great problems that we're facing in our society though is we don't know how to do that with intellectual ability. We're sorting people and segregating people based upon intellectual ability but we don't know how to identify it, we don't know how to talk about it, we don't know how to esteem people for their ontological value that is not based upon intelligence while simultaneously segregating people for intelligence.

I don't have any solution to that, all I know is it matters. So how do you screen for intelligence? Well I think academic ability is the most obvious useful screen that we have for that. Academic ability and academic achievement is a useful proxy for IQ. So you want to understand what kind of grades is the person...

what kind of grades does someone that you're interested in marrying get when they were young and how far does this person's academic education go. Now if the result of educational attainment is high, let's say that you are highly educated, you have a master's degree, a PhD, a college degree of some kind, then almost certainly you're going to be attracted to people who are also highly educated.

If you are younger and let's say you're 20 years old and you are trying to assess somebody, you can't assess somebody based upon whether or not this person has a PhD, obviously, you know, you're 20 years old. So then your filter is going to be based upon grades. What kinds of grades does somebody get when young?

People who do well in school are likely to do well in school and doing well in school is a useful and productive proxy that other people can use to measure intelligence, the components of intelligence that relate to academic ability at least. IQ is not the only important component of intelligence and if you dig into the IQ debates you can see that it seems like a useful metric that is able to be measured but not a complete metric.

So hopefully in a decade or a couple of decades we'll know how to deal with it but for now you should be generally attracted to somebody who gets grades kind of like you do and does well in school and that should be a component that you use to filter prospective marriage candidates by.

Now in a moment I'm going to talk about the heritability of intelligence. One of the challenges though is we need to be careful. I think that your basic filter here should be how well does somebody do in school. The filter should not necessarily be how many advanced degrees does a person have because there may be a negative effect to somebody having a lot of advanced degrees.

Remember earlier I tried to make the distinction I want to put in your mind there's a difference between marrying well and reproducing and marrying well you could have two academics right, two PhD holders that come together and they both have just this passionate academic career and he studies advanced I don't know cosmology and she studies advanced biological science and they can have the happiest most fulfilling marriage in the history of mankind.

Statistically they probably aren't going to reproduce very well, they're probably not going to have children. If they do have children they're probably not going to have many children. There's going to be some challenge here and the challenge is that in our current relatively antenatal age higher levels of educational achievement don't always correlate to having more children because of the investment into attaining higher levels of achievement.

This is different for men and for women but I think educational achievement and income need to be measured. What we know is men who earn higher incomes, the higher a man's income goes the more children he tends to have. Women who earn higher income, the higher her income goes the fewer children she tends to have.

That's not true when it's related to wealth. So as I understand the data women who are wealthy or who earn income in forms other than wages they tend to have more children. But it's women who earn a lot of money don't tend to, in wages don't tend to have very many children.

So this can be a real challenge. Imagine that you are a man and you're trying to filter for a woman and you want to have a happy marriage where you have good compatibility between you and you also want to have five children. Statistically if you marry a woman who is very invested into her academic career and she's pursuing a PhD and she's going to go and get a job she's not going to have many children.

Quite simply she's going to run out of time to have children. So unless she is developing some kind of creative – sorry, she's going to run out of time to have children and she probably is going to be so devoted to her career that she's just not that interested in having children.

So unless we can figure out how to develop a new model for young women that allows them to maximize their educational accomplishments and career prospects while also allowing them to have children when they are young and have their children fit around their career then we need to be really careful here of what you're actually filtering for.

Because you marry a girl because she's got a PhD and a great career, well that's wonderful. She's probably going to be phenomenally intelligent, hard-working, have enormous amounts of grit, perseverance. Those are great traits that you would love your children to inherit and you're probably not going to have many children.

So if we can filter and figure out how to help her to have children and express those traits in the future that's one of the things that we need to filter for. So let's talk about transmission. So your proxy, especially if you're a man, can't just be educational attainment.

It has to be something prior to that which is going to be grades and I'm just going to say educational potential. Let's talk just for a moment about the transmission of intelligence to the next generation. Back to Coming Apart by Charles Murray from his section on homogamy. This section is entitled Transmission of Cognitive Ability to the Next Generation.

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Go to lipsandads.com now that's l-i-b-s-y-n ads.com. Another consequence of increased educational and cognitive homogamy is the increased tenacity of the elite in maintaining its status across generations. The adage "shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations" grew out of an observed reality. If the children and grandchildren are only average in their own abilities, money from a fortune won in the first generation won't keep them at the top of the heap.

When the parents are passing cognitive ability along with the money, the staying power of the elite across generations increases. Specific numbers can be attached to such statements. The stability of the average IQs for different levels of educational attainment over time means that we can predict the average IQs of children of parents with different combinations of education.

And we can also predict where the next generation of the smartest children is going to come from. On average, children are neither as smart nor as dumb as their parents. They are closer to the middle. This tendency is called regression to the mean. It exists independently of genes. Regression to the mean is a function of the empirically observed statistical relationships between the tested IQs of parents and children.

Given the parameters in a previous note, the expected value of the IQ of a grown-up offspring is 40% toward the population mean from the parent's midpoint IQ. Suppose we have four white couples with the same level of education. Plugging in the average IQs for those levels of education as given in a previous table, I add a fifth couple who both have degrees from elite colleges with a midpoint IQ of 135.

Here is what we can expect as mean IQs of the children of these couples. So we have the parents' educations and the expected IQ of the child. If the parents' educational level is that they are two high school dropouts, the expected IQ of the child is 94. If parents' education is two high school diplomas, the expected IQ of the child is 101.

If parents have two college degrees and no more, the expected IQ of the child is 109. If the parents' education is two graduate degrees, the expected IQ of the child is 116. And then if the parents' education is two degrees from an elite college, the expected IQ of the child is 121.

These represent important differences in the resources that members of the next generation take to the preservation of their legacy. Consider first a college graduate who marries a high school graduate, each with the average cognitive ability for their educational level, 113 and 99 respectively. Their expected midpoint IQ is 106.

Suppose they built a small business, been highly successful, and leave five million dollars to their son. If their son has the expected IQ of a little less than 105, he will have only about a 50% chance of completing college, even assuming that he tries to go to college. Maybe he inherited extraordinary energy and determination from his parents, which would help, but those qualities regress to the mean as well.

Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generation is a likely scenario for the progeny of that successful example. Compare that situation with the one facing the son of two parents who both graduated from elite schools. If he has exactly the expected IQ of 121, he has more than an 80% chance of getting a degree if he goes to college.

These percentages are not a matter of statistical theory. They are based on the empirical experience of both the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. If you had an IQ of 105 or one of 121 and entered college, those are the probabilities that you ever got a degree.

In addition to those differing chances of graduation are qualitative differences between young people with IQs of 105 and 121. First the reasons that someone with an IQ of 105 doesn't finish college probably include serious academic difficulties with the work, whereas the reasons a person with an IQ of 121 doesn't finish college almost certainly involve motivation or self-discipline.

No one with an IQ of 121 has to drop out of college because he can't pass the courses. Second there is a qualitative difference in the range of occupations open to those two young persons. The one with an accurately measured IQ of 105 cannot expect to be successful in any of the prestigious professions that are screened for IQ by their educational requirements, for example medicine, law, engineering, and academia.

It is unlikely that he can even complete those educational requirements. Someone with an accurately measured IQ of 121 can succeed in any of them if his mathematical and verbal talents are both strong or succeed in the ones geared to his talents if there is an imbalance between mathematical and verbal ability.

Now think in terms of an entire cohort of children. Where will the next generation of children with exceptional cognitive ability come from? For purposes of illustration let's say that exceptionally high cognitive ability means the top five centiles of the next generation of white children. More than a quarter of their parents may be expected to have a midpoint IQ of more than 125.

Another quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ of 117 to 125. The third quarter may be expected to have midpoint parental IQ of 108 to 117. That leaves one quarter who will be the children of parents with midpoint parental IQ of less than 108. Only about 14% of that top five centiles of children are expected to come from the entire bottom half of the distribution of white parents.

Therein lies the explanation for that startling statistic I reported earlier about SAT scores. In 2010 87% of the students with 700 plus scores in critical reading or mathematics had a parent with a college degree and 57% had a parent with a graduate degree. Those percentages could have been predicted pretty closely just by knowing the facts about the IQs associated with different educational levels and the correlation between parental and child IQ.

They could have been predicted without making any theoretical assumptions about the roles of nature and nurture in transmitting cognitive ability and without knowing anything about the family incomes of those SAT test takers, how many test preparation courses their children took, whether they went to private schools or how ingenious the educational toys in the household were when they were toddlers.

In an age when the majority of parents in the top five centiles of cognitive ability worked as farmers, shopkeepers, blue-collar workers, and housewives, a situation that necessarily prevailed a century ago given the occupational and educational distributions during the early 1900s, these relationships between the cognitive ability of parents and children had no ominous implications.

Today, when the exceptionally qualified have been so efficiently drawn into the ranks of the upper middle class and where they are so often married to people with the same ability and background, they do. In fact, the implications are even more ominous than I just described because none of the numbers I used to illustrate the transmission of cognitive ability to the next generation incorporated the effects of the increased educational homogamy of recent decades.

In any case, the bottom line is not subject to refutation. Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will come from parents in the upper middle class and more specifically from parents who are already part of the broad elite. I want you to understand that intelligence is inherited and so you want to marry the most intelligent person that you can because you want your children to be smart, because intelligence makes everything easier in life, and so you want to marry the most intelligent person that you're able to.

If you want your wealth to continue through the generations and you want to break that shirt-sleeves-to-shirt-sleeves problem, you clearly see that you need to account for intelligence. You want to marry the kind of person who is intelligent as best you're able to attract. Here's my message loud and clear.

Let me pause for just a moment so you'll listen. Your future wife, who is intelligent, is almost certainly going to be enrolled in college. Right now, we have an enormous social problem brewing. It's already here. The big – there's many problems. I don't know how to solve – by the way, I don't know how to solve the social issues just described in what I have read.

All I know is that for you as an individual, if you want to be wealthy, you want to marry a wealthy – excuse me. If you want to be wealthy, you want to marry an intelligent spouse and you want your children to be intelligent. So I don't know how to solve the social mixing problem.

We'll figure out some solutions to it. I don't have any today. What I know is that you need to marry somebody who is smart. But men, right now, girls and women are going to college at a rate that is – I think it's like two-thirds female and one-third male.

There is a strong movement of men to go away from college. Some of these reasons are valid. Some of these reasons are less valid. College probably has been broadly oversold to many people. The financial impact of college has resulted in more people going to college than should go to college.

I don't know how to solve all these issues. But men and young women – this is a problem – sorry, it's both. Men and women are facing enormous problems. A lot of men right now are bitter about how many women have been funneled into the college pipeline. Women are handed constant and never-ending encouragement in our society that men never receive.

And the underperformance of men in the current age is something that we've got to take seriously if we're going to save our civilization. Women receive constant affirmation and men receive almost constant confrontation. The school environment, starting in elementary school, is mostly toxic to men. It's very highly favored in favor of women.

Everything in our society is structured around "you go, girl, you go, girl," and almost all of it is anti-male. As the father of four sons, I pay a lot of attention to this. I don't know how to solve all of those things, and I don't want to necessarily go down the rabbit trail of trying to figure out today what's right and what's wrong.

Maybe everything was wrong with our previous civilization. Maybe our previous civilization was just cruel to women and froze them out of everything and imposed enormous ceilings on them, maybe. But in the wake of feminism, we've become very anti-male, and our boys are failing to thrive. One expression of that is that many of them are not going to college.

And so maybe it was a bad thing that 100% of previous college attendees were men, and then it was 80%. Maybe that was a bad thing and it had to be corrected. But what we currently see in the current data is that 50% isn't working. So now it's gone lopsided in the other direction.

And what is happening as a result of this? Well, women are generally desiring to have a relationship with men who are their equal or superior. Women tend to be more hypergamous than men are. They want to marry a man who is in a better station in life than they are, someone who's more successful, more sophisticated, more intelligent, more accomplished, whereas men don't have the same preference.

Men want to marry a woman who makes them feel good, who gives them peace in their life, who compliments them, gives skills and things like that. Men don't go around wanting to marry women who are their superiors and who are better than them in some metric. It causes men to be frustrated and feel frustrated with their lives.

So what is happening, though, is that so many women now are not able to find what they perceive to be high-quality marriage candidates. And so they're all competing desperately for this tiny cohort of college-age men. Most of them are having polygynous relationships with men, whether they know it or not.

If you look at the data, it's clearly polygynous relationships, and in many cases they know it. And the extent of this is that they're not marrying, and so then those men that are in college are often—I don't want to go beyond what I can prove from the data, so I'll just pause and rather than say any more, it's a real problem.

So for men, just recognize, though, that in this basically birth-to-college pipeline that most girls grow up in, if you are going to marry an intelligent woman, it's almost unthinkable to see why she wouldn't have a college degree or be enrolled in college. Our culture is pushing, pushing, pushing girls and young women to college at enormous rates.

It supports them left, right, and center. It encourages them that you have to do this. You have to do this. It pours money into them, pours all kinds of special advantageous programs for them. And so as a man, there's a decent chance that if you're a young man, you're pretty annoyed about that, because you didn't get any of that.

Nobody pushed you in that direction. You didn't get any of the money. You didn't get any of the support. You didn't get any of the extra tutoring, whatever. Suck it up. Life's not fair. The point is that if you're going to marry an intelligent woman, she's almost certainly going to be in college.

In order for her not to be in college or not to have a college degree of some kind, she would have to be incredibly iconoclastic, incredibly anti-trend, et cetera. And that's just not a normal female trait. It's believable to think that a very highly educated, highly qualified, intelligent woman could find a man who just was so smart that he saw the stupidity of the college sorting mechanism.

And he went out and he started – he's a high school dropout, but he started five businesses and he's got $10 million in net worth by the time he's 21 years old. And she could pick him, target him, attract him, seduce him, marry him, boom. That's entirely believable. Because we know that happens significantly.

There are a lot of men who do that. Men are much more likely to be that kind of anti-authoritarian kind of guy. It doesn't work the other way. And so if you're a man and you're looking for a wife, almost certainly the best place to be looking is on a college campus.

If you are remotely close in age to the kinds of women that you would find on a college campus. And I find this discussion incredibly funny and ironic. I believe that what I've described, though I have used more words than I would like, is absolutely logically true. But I find it ironic because years ago, not only would I have made fun of – when I was in college, I would have made fun of the idea that a useful reason to go to college is to find a wife or a husband.

We all made fun of it because it was the MRS degree. And so men made fun of women for going to college to meet a husband. I never make fun of anyone today who has a strategy to land a husband or a wife. I never make fun of them because I've seen how those girls who have a strategy to land a husband, they get married and I wish them all the best.

I don't make fun of anybody today for having a strategy to attract a high-quality spouse. What I find ironic and funny is that I now think that the tables have turned, that the women who go to college are going to have a hard time finding a husband in many cases, and that now going to college is going to be a reliable – a good reason for going to college is to find a great wife, and that going to college is going to be a more reliable way for a motivated young man who wants a wife to find and attract – to find, filter and attract her than many other types of strategies.

And so I've counseled this repeatedly to young men who are of college age. If you are intelligent, for most intelligent people, academics are pretty easy. The only reason academics are not easy is because you get tired of them. So take a break or two, but if you're 25 years old and you've got a bachelor's degree, go get a master's degree because you're going to find it easier to be in contact with a lot of young women who are good candidates for marriage because that's where they're all been sorted into.

And it's a perfectly reasonable, valid strategy that people don't appreciate to the degree that they ought to appreciate. Now for young women who are in college, I would say that I think there's probably still a competitive strategy that if you're trying to attract a man that you meet in college, I think that there are competitive strategies that you could employ to express femininity that would help you to attract a man, especially a man who is likely to be a good husband.

One of the ironic things about the feminist revolution is that what today we refer to as feminism I think could equally be called masculinism. What I mean is simply that almost every trait that you'll hear a feminist talking about, about wanting to encourage in young girls and women, is actually a trait that men traditionally have.

And it's not that feminists want to be more feminine and express their woman-ness to a stronger degree. On the contrary, feminists want to be less feminine and express their inner masculinity to a stronger degree. And so most feminist women tend to wind up looking and sounding a lot like men than like women.

I think a good strategy for young women who are fighting, finding themselves in environments where they're fighting for a small pool of men to employ, is reject feminism and lean into femininity. So reject trying to be like a man and instead embrace being truly feminine. And I think that this kind of expression of femininity is your magic formula to attract a very high quality man.

Because you will wind up creating for him the kind of environment that he is likely to really resonate with, regardless of whether he can explain it or not. And this doesn't in any degree mean that you have to sacrifice your intellectual ability, your academic ability, those kinds of things.

Those things are important. And a smart man wants to marry a smart woman. But putting it crudely to make the point so that it will stick in your mind, imagine that you are a 20-year-old young lady and you're in college and you want to attract a really high quality husband.

Let's assume that your plan is to become a medical doctor or to get a PhD in neuroscience. And what I'm trying to demonstrate is that you're a woman of ambition. You're a woman of ability and you have high ambitions for your intellect, for your career, things like that. If you dye your hair blue, if you chop all your hair off, dye your hair blue and go parading around in the streets at the next political march holding a cardboard sign, the chances of your being single five years from now are very, very high.

On the other hand, if you grow your hair long, put on a cute sundress and learn how to cook amazing food, the chances of your being married to a doctor five years from now are very, very high. There is no difference whatsoever in your fundamental academic ability, career ambition, intelligence.

There's no difference as to how serious a man will take you and respect you. A high quality husband is likely to appreciate and respect your intelligence. He's looking for those things. But there is an enormous difference in your attractiveness based upon how you express your femininity. So please, if you care about this stuff, don't be a feminist.

Be feminine. And men are not looking for weak, stupid women who just happen to be hot. Men are looking for strong – the kind of man that you want to be married to are looking for strong, confident, intelligent women who are women. I hope that helps someone who's younger.

Consider that college is an important strategy. So so far, genetic traits that we have to look for, I've talked about good health and longevity. I've talked about intelligence. I'm going to move a little faster because these other ones are important but they're more obvious and they're less easily measured.

We don't necessarily have as much data. The next trait I think you want to look for that is probably genetic is the trait of resilience or what today we would probably call grit. Grit is a characteristic that we resonate with. We know it's important. And it's a characteristic that's increasingly being measured in the social science.

It seems to be at least somewhat genetic. Marrying someone who is resilient and expresses strong stick-to-itiveness or strong grit means that you would be married to somebody who is able to overcome the challenges that life is going to throw at you. All of us face enormous setbacks and our ability to persevere through tough times is usually the key that leads to long-term success.

If you study millionaires, what you see is that it's very common for millionaires to go bankrupt at least a couple of times on their pathway to success. It's very common for people to be laid off from work. Very common for people to lose their businesses, to lose their livelihoods.

Many successful people face these things. The difference between somebody though who becomes a millionaire or a multi-millionaire has much more to do with his ability to dust off the failure and get up and keep going. A guy who goes bankrupt and rolls over and sits in the corner and sucks his thumb or says I'm depressed, I can't go on with my life just because I'm so depressed and sits around and whines about his condition in life is not likely to be wealthy.

But the guy who dusts himself off says that sucked, I don't want to do that again and goes after it again is the guy who's likely to be wealthy. What you see as you get older is you see that so much of long-term success in anything, in learning, in academics, in business success, in marriage, in everything in life has more to do with your ability to get knocked down and get up and try again than it does to do with the actual impact of getting knocked down or what it says about you.

Everyone gets knocked down. And so grit seems to be from what I can figure out to be at least somewhat genetic. I read one paper and let me just read you the initial abstract from it just so you get an idea that there's some people that are trying to understand this and find academic evidence for the heritability or non-heritability of a trait like grit.

I'm reading here from a British publication. The paper is called "True Grit and Genetics, Predicting Academic Achievement from Personality" by four authors, Rimfield, Kovas, Dale and Plumman. Here's the abstract. "Grit, perseverance and passion for long-term goals has been shown to be a significant predictor of academic success, even after controlling for other personality factors.

Here for the first time, we use a UK representative sample and a genetically sensitive design to unpack the etiology of grit and its prediction of academic achievement in comparison to well-established personality traits. For 4,642 16-year-olds, 2,321 twin pairs, we use the GRIT-S scale, perseverance of effort and consistency of interest, along with the big five personality traits to predict scores on the General Certificate of Secondary Education, GCSE exams, which are administered UK-wide at the end of compulsory education.

Twin analyses of grit perseverance yielded a heritability estimate of 37%, 20% for consistency of interest and no evidence for shared environmental influence." I repeat, "Heritability estimate of 37% and no evidence for shared environmental influence. Personality, primarily conscientiousness, predicts about 6% of the variance in GCSE scores, but grit adds little to this prediction.

Moreover, multivariate twin analyses showed that roughly two-thirds of the GCSE prediction is mediated genetically. Grit perseverance of effort and big five conscientiousness are to a large extent the same trait, both phenotypically, R equals 0.53, and genetically, genetic correlation equals 0.86. We conclude that the etiology of grit is highly similar to other personality traits, not only in showing substantial genetic influence, but also in showing no influence of shared environmental factors.

Personality significantly predicts academic achievement, but grit adds little, phenotypically or genetically, to the prediction of academic achievement beyond traditional personality factors, especially conscientiousness." So you see that basically there is -- grit seems to be at least somewhat heritable. So I think that, more importantly, this is something that we know makes a difference.

So you're going to marry. You're going to, again, use my example, you're going to marry a man who flunks out of school. Do you want that man to get up and keep going or do you want him to curl up in the corner and suck his thumb? And if you're a man, think of what your wife wants.

Let's say that you're a man and you're marrying a woman and she gets a demotion at work. Do you want her to curl up and whine and cry into her bottle of wine about how hard life is and how it's so entirely unfair or do you want her to say, "All right, well, I'll have to work harder next time"?

Lack of grit is just flat-out annoying, if nothing else. You don't want to live with somebody who does this. And remember that you're going to be facing the challenge of supporting this person emotionally. And so one of the most valuable aspects that we get from marriage is emotional support.

If I face a difficulty in my life, I want to be able to go home and cry on my wife's shoulder and for her to let me cry for a few minutes and then the next day say, "All right, get out there. I believe in you." And yet she can only do that so many times.

It's fine for me to go and have a good cry one time, but if I turn into a blubbering mess and I do that a second time and a third time and a fifth time, it's going to be tough for her to continue that. Similarly, as a husband, if my wife faces difficulties, I'm going to be there for her.

I'm going to be there to support her. I'm going to be there to build her up and hold her while she cries and say, "It's okay, girl. Let it go." And on the second day, all right, I'm going to do it. But on the third day, come on, suck it up.

Life is tough. And so that's going to be super, super annoying if you're an achiever. And so this expression of grit, I think, gets at what we're looking for, is that we want to be married to somebody who's not going to just drag us down all the time into an emotional morass.

And once you're married, now you've got to figure out how to build this person up. And marrying somebody who's emotionally handicapped and can't deal with setbacks in life is no formula for a happy life. So on what basis would you judge the grit that somebody is displaying in his or her life?

I don't have as useful or as convenient of a proxy as I do for the previous one. So for health, we can use beauty and attractiveness and athletic ability as pretty decent markers for health, especially if you bring in family history and longevity of parents and grandparents as well.

For intelligence, we can use academic ability and grades in academia as a pretty decent proxy for intelligence. How do you judge grit? I don't have a decent of a proxy. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read to you a list of basically characteristics that are associated with grit.

And I think these are things that you want to look for. So first, persistence in the face of challenges. You want to ask yourself, does this person that I'm interested in marrying demonstrate, has he or she demonstrated persistence in the face of challenges? Does this person demonstrate consistency and commitment, perseverance in pursuit of passion, resilience in adversity, the ability to delay gratification, effortful engagement, goal clarity and direction, seeking and embracing challenges, adaptability and learning from failure, and then long-term drive towards achievement and success.

All of these are components of grit. So look for activities in which your potential spouse has faced disaster and failure and been overwhelmed and overcome, and then try to figure out what happened next. If those things aren't there, then I would say try to negotiate some kind of circumstance in which you could test for grit in some way.

I'll get to that in a moment when I talk about testing for basically social intelligence and emotional stability that we want to just consider, does this person demonstrate grit? Next, drive and ambition. I think you want to seek a partner who demonstrates drive and ambition because there does seem to be a genetic component to drive and ambition, and they put our finger on something that just drives somebody.

Now I don't know whether it's all genetic on a physical basis or whether it's more of what I'm going to get to in a moment of long-term environmental influence, but if you're married to a motivated spouse, then your marriage is more likely to have more opportunities for wealth creation and financial growth.

Generally women seem to be much more attuned to this than men because I think women naturally sense their vulnerability if they marry a man who is of low ambition. A woman, a high-quality, motivated, ambitious woman will, I can't even conceive of a woman like that being married to a man of low ambition.

Low ambition is an enormous turnoff for women, and again I think this is right, I think it should be. What I always notice is, especially with regard to bearing children, I notice how vulnerable what my wife is when she has children. It puts her in an enormous vulnerable place that if she couldn't trust me and know that I'm going to keep pressing forward, then it would be very difficult for her.

It would bring an enormous emotional instability to her. So how do you filter for that? Well if she's going to marry one young, she's not going to filter for a man who is rich, doesn't have time to be rich, or earns a lot of money even, doesn't have time to earn a lot of money, just getting started in his career.

So the filter is drive and ambition. Now men I don't think filter so much for this, but I think we should. Here's the problem with the filter, is that when I say drive and ambition, we're so indoctrinated into automatically thinking of that in a career perspective, that it causes us to ignore other expressions of drive and ambition.

I'm not necessarily interested, as a primary thing, of marrying a woman who has huge career drive and ambition. I don't think that's a disqualifying factor, although in some cases it would be. If a man wants to have children, and if his wife is so driven to make a difference in a career that's going to require her to be a non-stop partner at her law firm, and she's just never ever going to be willing to have children because of the cost of her career, then that is a disqualifying factor for a man who wants to have children.

Remember again, I said marriage as compared to having children. Two components that are related, but not synonymous. So I don't think that career ambition is necessarily a disqualifying factor, except in its extreme form. But what I observe is that I think career ambition can often, is a useful proxy, but it's not a complete proxy.

I've known many women who had no specific career ambition of, "I really want to, again, get a PhD and get, I really wanted to win a Nobel Prize in physics," who had enormous drive and ambition on the domestic front. They really wanted to build a family and change the world with their family.

Or on a cultural front, "We really need to change this community. We really need to adjust this political issue." And as I talked about on a recent Q&A with a young lady who was thinking about the pros and cons of becoming a mother and staying a stay-at-home mother versus otherwise, what I observe is that in our entirely career-focused, income-generating-focused society, as we've pushed all drive and ambition in that direction and said that it all has to be financially related, we've eliminated a lot of drive and ambition from a lot of our communities.

And our parks are disgusting, and our roads are destroying the vitality of town life. And because we've centered everyone of drive and ambition into a focus of earning lots of money. This does apply equally to men and to women. I think that in many cases, a woman will be attracted to a man who has great drive and ambition, but his goal is not to make money.

His goal is to make a difference. His goal is to change his community. His goal is to save the lost. His goal is to green the desert. And so drive and ambition are important components, and they will be correlated with financial pursuit, but not synonymous for it. Now, I think a good proxy for filtering for drive and ambition, since we can't predict all of the expressions of it, I think is growth mindset.

So this is a term that we increasingly hear about. Carol Dweck, of course, famously pioneered it. What I think growth mindset is a core component of what I would look for, what I look for in a healthy marriage, and what I think most people should, is that, is this person committed to learning and growing and changing at every stage?

People who don't have a growth mindset, I think, are going to just be bad spouses, because they're not likely to put away the things that they had before and embrace something new. And the whole growth of being married and having children is that you're going to have to grow and change, and there's going to be new skills required.

I need to develop new skills as a husband, my wife needs to develop new skills as a wife, we need to develop new skills as father and mother, we need to develop new skills as grandfather and grandmother in the fullness of time, as uncle and aunt, as community members.

And so what you're looking for is growth mindset. So I don't have a great way to do that, but I think that you should always be listening and filtering based upon, is the person that I'm attracted to demonstrating his or her ability to grow and to change, to set aside things that were perhaps useful before and commit himself to a growth mindset?

Is he willing to say, you know what, I don't think what I used to believe, I'm willing to change my perspective, I'm willing to change my opinions, and I think this is a good expression of drive and ambition. And we should filter drive and ambition not exclusively based upon earning ability, but broadly bring it in as a basic human component and see its expression in other ways.

I really appreciate that my wife has demonstrated growth mindset and has demonstrated drive and ambition towards my children. That makes me much, much more satisfied with her as a good wife than if she hadn't done that over the last 10 years. I believe that if she were asked, she would say the same thing about me, is that I've grown in my ambition towards my children over the years.

So my drive and ambition is not exclusively represented in a money-earning aspect, but it's a core part of what I see as my overall growth mindset. The next characteristic is social intelligence. Here what I think we really want to filter for is sociopaths and people who just clearly, genetically or whatever, who are not capable.

If you can marry a spouse who has strong social intelligence and has strong representation of traits like empathy and has good communication skills and shows that he or she can build and maintain relationships, then I think you're on the fast track to success. Intelligently intelligent individuals are good at networking and negotiation and collaboration.

These are all core components not only of a good marriage, but just to good business success, good financial success, to career advancement and business partnerships and finding wealth and investment opportunities. Social ability and social or emotional intelligence and social intelligence is core, and so we need to filter for that.

Don't marry somebody, especially don't ever marry or be in a relationship with someone who's a psychopath or has the negative stuff, doesn't treat you well, doesn't respect you, doesn't appreciate you, doesn't express those things verbally and in action. Filter out all the negative stuff, but then filter for people who express these things on a high degree.

So I think some proxies, again imperfect, but does this person I'm interested in, does he or she demonstrate care for others? Are social situations smooth and easily navigated? Does he or she respect other people and demonstrate that respect? When I was thinking about this in preparation for the show, I thought of some of the aphorisms that I think are true and worth paying attention to.

So one I like is how you do anything is how you do everything. How you do anything is how you do everything. It's not literally true, but it's metaphorically true that generally people who are good at business are probably going to be devoted to their marriage in many cases and by devoted to their business meaning because devotion is a feature that applies broadly.

Someone who's devoted to his marriage is probably going to be likely to be devoted to his health. How you do anything is how you do everything. But in a social dimension, things like this, well if she'll cheat with you, then she'll cheat on you. There's an aphorism there. I think it's true.

People who cheat on their partner to be with you are probably likely to cheat on you to be with someone else that comes along who's better than you. I always like things that are especially related to our appreciation of social elite such as judging a successful man or woman by how he or she treats servants or people who are not in the social class that he comes from.

I find that the way that people treat people who can't do anything for them is a pretty decent way to understand how they're going to treat you. There are people who only treat other people as something they can get and there are people who just genuinely treat everyone with respect and appreciation.

And sometimes, you know, we all appreciate the stories about how the president of the country or the CEO of the business comes in and is always careful of the staff and of his servants and treats everyone with respect. So look at the person and don't be in a relationship with somebody who treats other people poorly.

If a man will belittle other people to you, then he'll belittle you to other people. Or if a woman will belittle other people, then she will belittle you once she has you. Now marriage is not as enduring as it once was, but frequently there's – I think it used to be that there was more of a disparity between how people acted to land a husband or land a wife and how they acted after they landed the husband or wife.

But the point remains that if someone's going to talk poorly about other people to you or gossip about other people to you, then be careful because he or she is likely to betray your trust and your intimacy to other people. One note, there is a difference between things that are gossip and things that are private.

It's not always wrong to speak about something that is private in a trusted relationship. I may be having a marriage problem and I may go to a trusted friend or trusted advisor and in confidence share about this particular problem that I'm having and I may even expose intimate personal details, private details to this person.

However, I don't go and ever gossip about and just kind of say, "Oh, let me just tell you all the bad things and bad mouth my wife." I would never do that. And so be careful because you're not going to generally know what other people are saying about you to other people, but you can judge how people speak, how he or she is likely to speak about you to other people based upon how he or she speaks about other people with you.

In the intimacy of a close relationship, you will speak about private affairs. I may speak about someone else's private affairs with my wife in the confidence and intimacy of a close relationship, but I would never and must never gossip or be frivolous or insulting about other people. If I'm going to speak about someone else's private affairs, it should only be done because of care and love for another person and a desire to genuinely help or explore something with my intimate spouse.

Similarly, if someone's going to bad mouth others, if he's going to bad mouth others to you, he'll bad mouth you to other people. These things are congruent. People of high social intelligence are congruent. They behave consistently among classes, among situations, in public, in a private, they're congruent. There may be exceptions.

We all have moments of weakness, moments of frustration, anger, but there is going to be a high degree of congruence. So don't think that somehow this person who is socially stupid and toxic is going to just magically turn into a great spouse. Nope! He's not. She's not. And then related to having moments, emotional stability.

I think that you want to seek a partner who has a strong predisposition, which I think there's probably some genetic component towards it, but a strong predisposition towards emotional stability and resilience. Emotional stability helps people to navigate stress and uncertainty and interpersonal conflicts and to do these things effectively.

It builds good relationships and it reduces the likelihood of impulsive financial decisions driven by emotional turbulence. People who go out and do retail therapy, avoid like the plague someone who does that. Don't do that. Somebody who thinks that going out and spending money frivolously is a substitute for a healthy activity is not going to treat your finances well.

You can apply a little bit of judgment. If she calls at retail therapy and goes shopping with her best friend for five hours and buys a $5 latte and a $20 item that was 50% discounted, okay great. But if she calls it retail therapy and goes out and comes back with stacks and stacks of designer brands, don't marry this woman.

You're doomed if you do. You want to choose somebody who is emotionally stable. Now I don't have a great proxy for this. I've considered, I've been learning about the big five personality test and it was alluded to in the abstract that I read, but I don't know what the great proxy is for emotional stability.

I'd have to wait until one of you psychologists listeners can tell me what it is. My only thought is that you should observe the person you're interested in through times of emotional extremes. Is this man or is this woman emotionally, generally emotionally stable? I think there are a couple of things that should be generally obvious that are necessary of a productive courtship relationship.

Let me explain for just a moment. Traditionally in our Western tradition, and I'll bring the recent tradition into it, we've generally brought in a phased approach to relationships. What are the phases of relationships? Generally a relationship would go quickly from acquaintance or knowledge of one another or friendship to courtship.

In the past 50 years we added a phase of relationship called dating. So in the world that I grew up in, which is different from today's world, in the world that I grew up in you would have an acquaintance or a friendship, then you would move from an acquaintance relationship or a friendship relationship to a dating relationship and then a dating relationship was generally considered to be some form of committed monogamous relationship that in the healthiest of cases had marriage as a potential outcome, a potential positive outcome, but there was not a commitment to marriage yet.

It was boyfriend/girlfriend exploring the relationship, exploring one another, getting to know one another with an idea that this would lead to marriage in the fullness of time. Then you would go from a dating relationship to an engagement and usually of course dating would involve some more obvious expression of courtship, so you would have that engagement.

Engagement was a time in which you were publicly committed to be married and in a time of public commitment to be married, then you were exploring compatibility, engaging in marital counseling, premarital counseling, exploring things and you were heading towards marriage. Then there was marriage and marriage was the final point, the final time.

Now we're in it. We're in it for life, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, sickness and health, no matter what, we're in it till death do us part. That was the culture that I grew up in and before. Today most of those clear stages of relationship seem to have collapsed for most people who aren't coming from a strong subculture.

By strong subculture I mean a strong religious community with clearly defined stages of relationship, a strong family community with clear expectations. Just speaking broadly in the general culture, it seems to me that young men and women who are interested in each other are navigating a morass of undefined relationships.

You can be dating, but dating doesn't necessarily mean monogamy. You can be having sex with someone, but it's just a situationship. It's not a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. You can be – I mean basically about the only cultural rule that seems to be still somewhat valid is engagement, that okay, we're engaged.

But then the problem with engagement is that engagement can last for a very long time and couples who aren't engaged are shacked up together for years and years and years and there may or may not lead to marriage. It's just enormously confusing. On the whole, this is enormously destructive.

It's destructive for men, it's destructive for women, and it's causing young men and women to lose out on some of the best, most important years of their life to filter for a potential relationship. It's enormously, especially I think where it really happens is men are, generally speaking, harming young women by engaging in things that either are a relationship or could be called a relationship without a plan to move that relationship to marriage.

There's a saying that I think is probably broadly true that women control access to sex and men control access to relationships. What has happened is in our current world, we have very high levels of sexual promiscuity and it seems to me that women have broadly lowered their demands, lowered the bar for access to sex.

That seems that many young women have been trained or decided to give men free and easy access to sex with almost no strings attached. The quaint "put a ring on it" idea has broadly disappeared from much of popular culture. Men – I don't know whether they've lowered the bar on access to relationships but men have seemingly largely figured out that they can get whatever they want to get without ever having to provide a relationship.

I consider this to be harmful. It's harmful to the men but it's very harmful for the women because women, in many cases, are giving their best, most fruitful, productive years to men who turn out to never actually have an ambition to a marriage and long-term relationship. So let's assume for the sake of argument that you see some problems with the current situation.

There can be a great temptation to say, "Well, we're just getting rid of all of that. Let's just go to marriage as fast as possible. Let's just marry off our 18-year-olds and have 18-day engagements." No, that's also wrong. The flip side is not to be gone after. While you probably know, as I do, some people who met each other and just instantly fell in love, instantly knew they were forever and six weeks later they're married and their marriage has endured for 16 years.

You probably know someone like that. Those people do not make the rule and we should not look to them as the rule. On the contrary, we need to think and say, "Why do we have stages of relationship? What are we looking for?" Well, things like emotional stability need to be sussed out.

You need to know someone for long enough to be able to judge, "Is this person emotionally stable?" which means that you need to be in relationship for a significant amount of time in order to judge through a period of intense emotional height and intense emotional lows. It'd be really great if you could see someone that you're considering married get kicked in the teeth by life and go through something really difficult as well as be put on stage and have 15 minutes of fame.

That would be fantastic because then you could judge how does this person respond in times of great distress and times of great jubilation. That's useful. That's why we have stages of relationship in a culture. That's why you have a courtship culture. The best way to observe somebody from afar is probably as a friend and so it's really healthy for young men and women to have friendships, broad numerous friendships with the opposite sex where there are friend interactions so you can see how people handle things.

It's really wonderful if you have been able to be friends with somebody for a long enough period of time to observe him or her go through triumphs and defeats so that you can see how does this person handle those things. The problem with friendships is that a lot of times friendships don't move out into the romantic zone and you wind up getting friend zoned if you're a guy, similar men can't – I don't think men can be friends with women.

Men are friends with women because they're hoping to get with women in some time. I know that's unpopular to say but I don't see the alternative ever being true. It's not true in my experience. I don't know any men who are genuinely friends with women on the long term who are not interested in a long term relationship.

At least past a certain age. I think an exception could be that when you're put together possibly in a social dynamic, you're in school together, you have just a natural reason to be together. You can be very friendly and be friends with women in that context. But when your friendship becomes something that happens outside of the social dynamic, I don't see how men and women can be friends on an ongoing basis.

The example I would use would just be this. As a married man, I enjoy friendships and interactions with women who are not my wife. But those interactions always happen in the context of a social environment in which the woman's husband is present or my wife is present and thus we have a group social environment.

The reason for getting together is not so that I can go and see my friend, the woman who is not my wife. On the contrary, we're getting together as a group and in that group I can enjoy friendships and relationships and conversation and dialogue and debate with a woman who is not my wife.

But the context has to be a group social environment and the woman's husband has to be part of it. So I am friends with women in the context of a group social environment. What I would never do is I would never be friends with a woman who is married to someone other man and say, "Hey, let's you and I go out to lunch together because we're friends." I would never do that because, and she wouldn't either, because there's not a friendship that can work outside of the group social environment.

So if we look at young people, what you see is that friendships between young men and young women or boys and girls, these are very productive when there's a reason to be involved in the group dynamic. Going to school together, doing a play together, going on a trip, things like that where you get to know people in that environment, those are really good opportunities and they're genuine useful friendships where you care about the person.

But when that friendship starts to go in the direction of spending individual time together outside of the context of the reason you came together and on a one-on-one basis, it's not possible for that to stay as just a friendship. The girl that was my friend in a group dynamic and then I started going out on a one-on-one basis as friends ultimately became my wife.

So there's my experience with it. So the point being that if you have the opportunity to observe your potential spouse in a group dynamic, then that's really great because there's less emotional ties. This person's not putting on airs for you. You can judge emotional stability and social intelligence in that context.

But that's not generally always a great pathway to marriage. You don't want to wind up just in the friend zone if you're looking for marriage. And so that's why dating exists. That's why we created the idea of dating to say there's a romantic attraction here. We're not just being friends and we're trying to spend some time in a relationship where we're not committed to marriage, but we're spending time in a relationship to where we can observe one another.

One of the enormous problems of dating, however, comes if dating becomes a sexual relationship absent marriage. Sex complicates everything. It dials everything, every emotional involvement, every emotional engagement up to an absolute maximum. Sex is not emotionally neutral. It affects the relationship very, very deeply and it affects the interactions between a man and a woman.

And so if you have a dating relationship where people are spending time together, and it can be in a group setting, it can be an individual component. If you can keep sex out of the relationship, you can have a much more objective observation of an individual for a continued period of time to be able to observe how is this person handling life.

Sex is best introduced in the context of a publicly acknowledged clear commitment that eliminates all of the uncertainty involving matters of consent, matters of respect, matters of just everything related to it. And so that's why we have marriage. And so these phases of the relationship, my point is not to harangue you about sex, but to say that these phases of relationship are really important.

And that dating and courtship, relationship leading to marriage, this is important because it gives a man and woman opportunity to observe one another and to have a romantic context that's different than friendship. But yet to not yet complicate matters with the heart, the emotions, the hormones, everything related to an intense sexual relationship.

Then when you move to courtship, that's where you can, sorry, when you move to engagement, that's where you can get genuinely intimate. It's not safe to share the deepest desires of your heart, the deepest ambitions that you have without a publicly acknowledged commitment. I would never go if I weren't married, I would never go and share the deepest desires and the deepest thoughts that I have and the biggest conflicts and the controversies and things like that with a woman where I had no public commitment of relationship.

And so engagement is designed to allow a couple to be safe enough to share with one another the most intimate secrets that they have because there is public commitment. But they do that sharing in the context in which it can still be terminated without excessive harm. I don't want to say without harm.

Terminating an engagement is not easy, but it's without excessive harm. Terminating a relationship in which you have both emotional intimacy and physical intimacy is potentially life-destroying. It comes with enormous cost and so this gradation of relationships allows a couple to observe one another in various scenarios and environments, but yet to have the ability to end it without the heart-wrenching emotional and physical intensity that happens if they are fully engaged and if the relationship has been sexually consummated.

That's reserved for marriage, which as we'll talk about in a moment, sees a couple through for the long term because the commitment carries you through the emotional instability. Now back to emotional stability. I don't have a great proxy for this, but what you want is enough time to observe the person through times of emotional extremes.

Is this person stable? And then I think an intelligent person, an intelligent man or woman would seek to create external influences that are likely to demonstrate emotional stability or instability. Let me give an analogy first. When you're learning to shoot a gun, if you're in the military, first thing you do is you learn to stand at the firing line and you learn to shoot the gun and you shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot.

Shooting a gun while standing at a firing line on a firing range is pretty easy. It doesn't require much. How do you simulate combat? Well, you can't simulate combat very effectively with troops safely if there's actually a risk of this person being injured. While some elite training and some training of your may actually have a live fire exercise where you could get killed while you're going under the barbed wire, generally no intelligent military commander is simulating combat in a scenario in which you are going to create the risk of death.

You don't kill your soldiers by training if you can possibly avoid it. So what do they do? They find something else that simulates the basic conditions of combat. And in firearms training, that's something like exercise. And so what they'll do is to practice your marksmanship skills. You start with just cool, calm, collected, putting in your shots, then you start running 20 yards.

So you sprint 20 yards down, sprint 20 yards back. Now your chest is heaving, your adrenaline's pumping, your body's all just going crazy. Now you got to shoot accurately with the adrenaline pumping. And that's analogous to a condition that you'll be in in combat. Similarly, a trainer will introduce other forms of stress.

They'll introduce light. They'll introduce loud noises. They'll put a megaphone up your ear and yell at you and insult you and criticize you and tell you you're ugly and shoot off flashbangs all around you. And so the stress that you simulate in training is designed to cause the same physical reactions that you're going to experience in other times of life.

To see how you respond and to learn mechanisms for responding to them. So what I would suggest to you that if you want to test emotional stability in someone that you're not married to, you need to have a period of time to observe the person in varying conditions. And it would be smart for you to introduce variability into that.

Let's imagine that all of your dates with your prospective spouse are just lovely dates where we go out to eat together and we're just happy and we walk around and we hold hands and we talk and share and whatnot. Well, your date is putting on makeup every single time.

He's putting on his best suit. You're constantly in nothing but idyllic circumstances. That's great. That's fun. It's also not a great test of emotional stability. What is a great test of emotional stability? Well, let's go out and let's take a long hike where we get hot, tired, and thirsty and see how do we do when we're hot, tired, and thirsty.

Let's go and get ourselves involved in some intense emotional situation where all of a sudden the emotions are high. It could be exercise. It could be a game. How does this person respond in these environments? And you go ahead and put your creativity to play. But I think that if you have the ability, you want to see your prospective spouse tested in a variety of situations, not just, "Hey, that's great.

This guy can walk up to the firing line and shoot a pistol." You want to insert uncertainty into the training mechanism so that there is a good evidence of long-term stability. This concludes the genetic traits that I think we should be looking for. And I want to move now to long-term family traits.

So what I mean here is not things that can be changed quickly, but what are the cultural conditions, the environmental factors that somebody has been exposed to that are likely to have a deep and enduring influence on this person to relate to how he or she is going to work in the long term, and especially with a focus on how will this affect the financial outcomes of my marriage.

So I don't think these are things that are physically genetic, but they're environmental, but they're not easily changed. I think one of the first ones, especially in the context of divorce proofing, remember that second factor. There's three factors. Factor number one is short and long-term financial income growth and basically ability to grow wealth.

The second is expenses, high expense lifestyle, the highest expense lifestyle being divorce. And then the third factor is just long-term benefits for my children. Those are kind of my three organizing principles here. So what are these factors then that are long-term and there's going to be a significant amount of divorce proofing here that needs to be talked about.

First one is the durability of marriage among parents and grandparents and extended family. Durability of marriage is an important metric to measure because it's the thing that you can see objectively that is not related to what someone says. It's related to what someone does. And it's something that you have to observe today because there's probably going to be a great discrepancy between what someone says and what someone does.

If I understand the research right now, but again, I would cite here Brad Wilcox's recent book on marriage. But what he alleges in his, what he asserts in his book is that the data demonstrates that the elite among us, socially elite, are very likely to say anything goes. A social elite is very likely to say, "Hey, you do you.

You live how you want to live. Marry who you want to marry. Love who you want to love. You do you. You just do whatever you want." But from a behavior perspective or from a cultural perspective, someone who is part of the current social elite is very likely to have very high standards of actual behavior.

And so you're going to get married and you're going to stay married. You're going to marry someone that's appropriately suited to you. You're not going to marry a wacko. There's a strong family and social pressure for these things. Now that's different than other classes. So although other classes are also likely now in today's world to say, "Hey, you do you.

You know, do whatever you live, how you want to live." And then they follow through on it. There's also people that profess to have standards like, "Oh, you've got to live this certain way." But in reality, their life doesn't match up to that. So what can you do? Well, I think you could judge someone by the durability of marriage among a person's parents or grandparents, siblings, extended family around.

Is this person surrounded by long enduring marriages? Now this is not necessarily a purely disqualifying criteria. We know that people whose parents are married in long-term marriages with no divorce, they are statistically more likely to stay in marriages themselves. But there are the flip side as well. It's not necessarily disqualifying.

But I think what you're really – meaning that parents divorce – if this person's parents are divorced, it's not, "Okay, that, out, done." But what you're looking for is to really understand the reasons. Because somebody's propensity to marry and divorce is very much going to be judged – is likely to be related to good decision-making.

Is this person surrounded by people who make good decisions, focusing on the long-term, focusing on what's best for the group, focusing on what's best for the children, for the tribe? Or is it all about short-term gratification? What's best for me? How do I feel at the moment? What makes me happy?

Is there a culture where bad decision-makers are just, "Oh, it's no big deal. So and so." "Oh, she was with this guy and she had another guy because she felt happy because she was with him because he just gave her the tickles." Or is there a culture where bad decision-makers are ostracized and shunned, or are they just accepted and it's no big deal?

Is there a family pressure towards being smart, making good decisions, going to college, choosing your friend group carefully, and maintaining enduring relationships? Here's my current working theory on durability of marriage relationships. I'm guessing that there's about 20% of people in society who are just naturally inclined to easily enter into marriage relationships, have them last forever, no problems whatsoever.

They never even struggle and try. It's just easy for them. I'm also guessing that there's probably 20% of people in society who are so hopelessly socially incompetent that they probably have no ability to ever form a long-term enduring relationship and it's just hopeless. They're never going to make it.

So I'm guessing that there's those two extremes. What I care a lot about, though, is the middle 60%, because I think the middle 60% is where we need strong social pressure. And marriage is one of those things where that strong social pressure really, really helps. And formerly, it seems like we had that culture, broadly speaking.

As a culture, we shunned and ostracized those who were divorced. We shunned and ostracized people who were unfaithful to their spouses. We shunned and ostracized people who made bad decisions. And clearly, that culture looked and said, "Hey, wait. This is bad. This is painful." That was why we invented no-fault divorce.

They said, "Well, we just, you know, people have irreconcilable differences and we just have to end this." Again, but I would say those are probably that bottom 20%. But what we've created in the wake of it is we've created a world in which there's not much support to get couples through the hard times.

And hard times are as normal and as expected in marriage as they are in business or in school or in athletics or in any other domain of life. And so the top 20% have the grit to just naturally get themselves through the hard times just with their own courage.

They face enormous difficulties and they just press through automatically because that's who I am. But in athletics, what we do is we coach that middle 60%. We say, "You can do it." In academics, we say, "If you fail, we're going to coach that middle 60%." And in life and in business, we coach that middle 60%.

We say, "Dust yourself off but stick with the plan. Stick with the vision." But in marriage, we don't coach that. We've created a culture in which instead of coaching that, we just automatically throw in the towel and we say, "No problem." And so it seems to me that we need to have that strong social pressure to keep the middle 60% of marriages together.

Now that pressure used to be legal and that was why no-fault divorce was such a disaster. Used to be understood that if I marry you and you marry me, if I don't commit adultery against you, I don't abandon you, I don't abuse you, that you got to stay married to me.

And that was the social contract and that kept people going in when they were excited and it kept it through them when they were unexcited and it provided and protected both people. It protected men and women. And as I said recently, marriage is a contract between a man and a woman where they put in differing amounts at different times.

If a couple marries young, the woman puts in her youth, her sexual attractiveness, her childbearing ability, her willingness to raise children when she's young and beautiful and every man in the world wants to be with her. And the man, and she chooses a man who has not yet achieved his potential.

When she's older though, the man is high income earning, has things to offer her, has stability, has confidence, has all these things that he probably didn't have when he was younger and he still sees that through. And so now though, what we've done is we've destroyed that social pressure and we have pulled it apart so that men and women don't have, but they don't have the pressure.

So the woman may invest into the relationship, her beauty, her fecundity, her years of raising children, then all of a sudden she's 40 years old and the man can toss her aside just because he feels like it. Or if the man comes along at an older age and he's wealthy and sophisticated and attractive and he marries a wonderful attractive woman, then she can just toss him aside because she wants half his money in divorce court with no moral error on his part.

And so we need that social pressure. Now I don't think we're going to get any legal social pressure, at least in the United States anytime soon. So what makes up for it? Well, it's got to be a family culture, it's got to be a religious culture, there's got to be pressure there that is going to be brought to bear to keep that middle 60% of marriages really strong and flourishing and give the highest possible nature of it.

And so there's got to be pressure that if I marry this woman and we have a big fight and she goes home crying to mama and she's telling mommy, "Oh, he said all these things mean things," and whatnot, you want to have the confidence to know that her mother is going to say, "All right, honey, cry, cry, cry, now go back and see your husband." Not that her mother is going to say to her, "Oh, honey, maybe you'd be better off with someone else." You got to have the confidence that.

You got to have the confidence that if you're going to marry this man and you're going to turn 30, then he's going to go to his dad and he's going to say, "You know what? She didn't lose that last 10 pounds after having our third baby, maybe I should trade her in." You want to have the confidence that his dad's going to look him in the face and pull out a belt and say, "You idiot, don't ever let me hear you say something like that again." Not, "Well, after all, maybe you could go and find another young sexy something or other." I'm using garish stereotypes to try to demonstrate the point that you want to be marrying into a culture that's going to promote your marriage and so you need to look for those long-term family traits in order to divorce proof your relationship.

What about the quality of relationships? I think you should look very carefully, what is the quality of parents' and grandparents' marriage relationships? I think in general, the natural inclination is the husbands are probably going to treat their wives about how they watch their fathers treat their mothers, at least to start with.

If you're a woman and you're looking at a man, you should go and look and see how does his father treat his mother and observe and say, "Do I like that?" I think wives in general are probably going to treat their husbands about how they watch their mothers treat their fathers, at least to start with.

If you're a man who's interested in a woman, go and spend some time watching how does her mother treat her father. Do you like that and do you want this person to treat you the way that you observe? If you see problems in that, not necessarily disqualifying, but does your prospective spouse also see those problems and does your spouse have a desire to change?

Think about these things from the quality and durability of relationship. I think you should look carefully at what is the family history of financial success. I don't believe that financial success is a matter of genetic history, at least not currently, but I think that if you consider your potential spouse's history of financial success, it can provide insights into genetic and cultural predispositions toward wealth accumulation.

What are you looking for? Responsible financial management, long-term thinking, people who have a strong locus of control, recognize that they're in charge of their situation rather than other people. Look for a history of entrepreneurial endeavors. Look for a high appreciation of academics and an honoring of people who are skilled and highly educated.

Look for generational wealth. These all are related to cultural factors that are likely to lead to your family being a prodigious accumulator of wealth. On a very practical level, it all comes down to what's going to be the encouragement if you say I want to start a business? What are her parents going to say?

Are they going to say absolutely you should start a business and let us be your first customer or are they going to say oh I think that's risky, you probably shouldn't. What if you say I'm learning about investing, do you have any tips for me? You don't want to sit around and talk about sports ball.

You want a family that's going to talk about investing. You want a family where money is honored and appreciated and focused on as a topic of conversation. It would be much easier for you to be successful in business, to be a successful investor, to be successful in financial management, if you had a family culture in which you're lauded for your wise decisions and your frugality and your conscientiousness rather than where you're made fun of for those factors.

And so recognize that the family history of financial success is going to be a big factor on you and it's going to be a factor on even just the nature of your relationship. If you're a man and you grew up and you're considering a woman who watched her father grow up working long hard hours and saw him struggle when he was young but now sees him as wealthy and accomplished and able to enjoy the fruit of his labors, she's going to really appreciate your long hard work much more than if she just never had any exposure to that and she's whining, "What's five o'clock?

You need to be here." No, she understands that you're going to need to make a sacrifice to be successful in business. Conversely, let's say that your wife, your potential wife grew up watching a man who was just a lazy jerk and her whole life he just was a total loser.

And so you don't want to be a loser. You want to make something of yourself but what if she doesn't expect you to make something of yourself? She doesn't think that's likely to be worth it. She's not going to push you. She's not going to encourage you. She's just going to assume, "Well, the man I'm married to is likely to be a lump just like my dad." You don't want that.

You want a wife who's going to push you, who's going to encourage you, who's going to – if you're sitting around because you got laid off, you don't want a woman who's going to say, "Well, honey, why don't you just sit around on the house and the couch and mope?" You want a woman who says, "Get out the door and go find a job and here's a kick in the butt." That's what you're looking for is a woman who will drive you and push you on and a lot of that is going to be driven by what she observed.

Let's say that you are interested in a woman whose father treated her mother very poorly, who committed adultery against her or who constantly didn't see to her needs, didn't see to her luxuries, never had enough money for anything. Well, now all of a sudden, there's a good chance that your wife is not going to be able to trust you and your willingness to provide for her and your ability.

She's going to feel like, "I've always got to have my own reserve set aside. I can't trust him. I've got to make sure that I make money." All this stuff goes very deep is the point and so you want to look and see what is the family history related to finance and how is that going to impact our financial culture.

What you're looking for is a culture of financial prudence and wise decision making. It's not about the actual dollar figures involved necessarily. That certainly helps. If you can marry a man whose dad earned, you know, eight figures instead of five figures, do it because there's a decent chance that the man that you're going to marry is more likely to earn eight figures instead of five figures.

Go for it. But it's not so much about the dollar figures. It's more about how are decisions made. You can have somebody that you're interested in who's driving a very expensive car. Maybe it's a really high-end Mercedes. That really high-end Mercedes can represent every last bit of money that this person can scrape together out of his monthly budget to buy on payments, to pay the lease payment.

Or it can represent just a completely negligible amount of financial wealth for the family and we just drive nice cars because it's a nice car and it doesn't even matter. So you can't judge it based upon the dollar figures of consumption. What you need to judge it based upon is what kind of consumption is rewarded and what kind of consumption is made fun of.

In a wealthy family, if somebody goes out and buys in a truly wealthy family, not an aspirational, not someone who's trying to lie their way into wealth, somebody goes out and buys a really high-end car and can't afford easily to buy it five times over with a tiny percentage of this year's profit portfolio, the wealthy family is going to make fun of that guy.

What are you doing? You're stupid. You don't do that. You don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. You nurture the goose and you only spend the eggs. So a wealthy family is going to make fun of somebody who makes a dumb financial decision and you're going to feel a strong desire to make a smart financial decision to honor your parents.

That's why many times you'll see wealthy people want to make sure their children are not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. They want to make sure they go out and experience life the hard way. And so if you say to a wealthy person, "I'm going to make this different choice because I'm saving my money," you're not going to lose face or lose status.

You're going to gain face and gain status because you're willing to be assertive related to your money. On the other hand, if there's a family that is just flagrantly consuming every dollar in high consumption living and never building something, then you're going to be chained eternally to spending money that you don't have because there's going to be this pressure from your potential spouse to spend money, spend money non-stop on these things that you can't afford.

So try to look and understand what these long-term features are in your potential relationship. Now not all of the traits are going to be financial. So it's not all just a function of money. What you really need to be thinking about is divorce proofing as well. The biggest financial problem that most people face that can just wipe them out is often going to be divorce.

So how do you divorce proof a marriage? Obviously there's a whole show here and I'm already at two and a half hours in, but let's start with just a little establishment of vision. I'm pulling this from a book by relationship researcher and guru John Gottman called Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

But here's what he says in the introduction to that book under a section titled The Purpose of Marriage. "In the strongest marriages, husband and wife share a deep sense of meaning. They don't just get along. They also support each other's hopes and aspirations and build a sense of purpose into their lives together.

That is really what I mean when I talk about honoring and respecting each other. Very often a marriage's failure to do this is what causes husband and wife to find themselves in endless, useless rounds of argument or to feel isolated and lonely in their marriage. After watching countless videotapes of couples fighting, I can guarantee you that most quarrels are really not about whether the toilet lid is up or down or whose turn it is to take out the trash.

There are deeper hidden issues that fuel these superficial conflicts and make them far more intense and hurtful than they would otherwise be. Once you understand this, you will be ready to accept one of the most surprising truths about marriage. Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other's mind, but it can't be done.

This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage. Instead, they need to understand the bottom-line difference that is causing the conflict and to learn how to live with it by honoring and respecting each other.

Only then will they be able to build shared meaning and a sense of purpose into their marriage. So at its core, recognize that the quality of your relationship is largely determined by these factors of long-term vision and don't expect the person you're marrying to change. That's why you want to spend time prior to marriage observing and carefully concerned how is our relationship working out.

That's why we have dating and courtship and engagement and then marriage. So judge your relationship and say, "Do I naturally have a high-quality relationship with good communication skills and mutual respect? Do we have good problem-solving ability? Do we have the ability to work on the relationship in a relatively easy way?" Divorce is fairly predictable.

Let me read from the same book called, again, this is John Gottman, Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, titled "Predicting Divorce with 91% Accuracy." "Thanks to decades of research, these questions can finally be answered. In fact, I can predict with great precision whether a couple will stay happily together or lose their way after listening to them interact for as little as 15 minutes.

Over seven separate studies, my accuracy rate in making such predictions has averaged 91%. In other words, 91% of the cases where I predicted that a couple's marriage would eventually either fail or succeed, time proved me right. I don't think my success in foretelling divorce earns me any bragging rights because it isn't due to some superhuman perception or intuition.

Instead, it rests solely on the science, the decades of data my colleagues and I accumulated." And then subsequently, "Emotionally intelligent marriages. What can make a marriage work is surprisingly simple. Happily married couples aren't smarter, richer, or more psychologically astute than others. But in their day-to-day lives, they have hit upon a dynamic that keeps their negative thoughts and feelings about each other, which all couples have, from overwhelming their positive ones.

Rather than creating a climate of disagreement and resistance, they embrace each other's needs. When addressing a partner's request, their motto tends to be a helpful 'yes, and' rather than 'yes, but.' This positive attitude not only allows them to maintain, but also to increase the sense of romance, play, fun, adventure, and learning together that are at the heart of any long-lasting love affair.

They have what I call an emotionally intelligent marriage." Emotional intelligence has become widely recognized as an important predictor of a child's success later in life. The more in touch with feelings and the better able a child is to understand and get along with others, the sunnier that child's future, whatever his or her academic IQ.

The same is true for spouses. The more emotionally intelligent a couple, the better able they are to understand, honor, and respect each other and their marriage, the more likely that they will indeed live happily ever after. Just as parents can teach their children emotional intelligence, this is also a skill that couples can learn.

As simple as it sounds, developing this ability can keep husband and wife on the positive side of the divorce odds. I was intending to go in and talk about divorce proofing. He has this great chapter in this book where he specifically goes through and says, "Okay, let's talk about it, but let's look for the signs of what causes a marriage to go bad, how I predict divorce." But it would probably take me about an hour to go through it.

So let me just set that aside to you and just encourage you, spend some time reading about marriage, reading about divorce, and make sure you understand what you're looking for. Especially, and again, this episode is geared towards people who are not married. That's what I'm hoping to reach. So if you are married, then you need to teach this to your children.

The great problem, one of the great problems that people face is in our culture is we don't talk enough about the simple things that lead to positive and negative outcomes related to marriage. And so because we're not talking about them enough, people are spending their time largely making decisions based upon emotional attraction.

Emotions are a fundamentally important component of a high quality marriage relationship. They are not the only component. They are the sauce on top of the food that makes the food incredibly delicious and savory, but they're not what sticks to your ribs. They're not what keeps you going through to the next meal.

Teach your children what to look for. If you're young, think about what to look for and be willing to have standards and important characteristics that you think are important that you're looking for. The next thing to look for is financial resilience and flexibility. And I repeat, I'm not trying to lay out all of the core components of a happy, healthy marriage.

There are many, many things. I'm trying to focus on what are those things that are probably going to make a big difference to the finances of a marriage. And some of them are important to keep the marriage going, but then I'm just focusing on the things that are financial.

You will have all kinds of other things that you appreciate and look for in marriage beyond these factors. But you want to look for financial resiliency and flexibility in your proposed spouse. For men, maintaining a wife in style is a very real goal for most men. It brings me enormous satisfaction to give my wife nice things, to spend money on her.

I derive enormous amounts of pleasure out of it. Similarly to my children, it makes me happy to provide luxuries for her. So maintaining a wife in style is a very real and satisfying goal for most men. Having to maintain a wife in style will poison a relationship. Her expecting to be maintained in style would eliminate all of the pleasure from my relationship.

And that's one of these interesting dichotomies that if you as a woman are generally low maintenance, you don't have a lot of needs, a lot of desires, your man is likely to do everything he can to provide every luxury and nicety that is within his ability, and he'll love doing it.

But if you turn around and you start setting conditions and having requirements that this is how I have to be maintained, then it will poison your relationship. So be careful about people who have high standards. Make sure that the person that you are interested in is resilient and flexible, knows how to be abased and knows how to abound, knows how to live in luxury and in style, and knows how to live in simplicity and in a basic way, knows how to travel in luxury and knows how to travel in poverty.

Just imagine that you're a woman and you're married to a man who, "I just can't eat. I just can't. I just can't," unless everything is just right, unless your house is exactly the way it's supposed to be, unless you maintain him exactly in style, or a wife, "I just can't sleep in that.

I can't." What an obnoxious persnickety people are annoying to live with. And so you should develop a way of testing the financial resiliency and flexibility of your proposed spouse. I would recommend to you that you try to schedule something that is really high end, a black tie ball, a beautiful gala, an elaborate weekend away, and see, "How does my proposed spouse do in finery and luxury and sumptuous surroundings?

Does he know his way around the dessert fork and the silverware? Does he understand how to be comfortable in high society?" I would also propose that you take a camping trip or a mission trip in an incredibly impoverished area, and you don't have access to a shower for three days, and you sleep on the ground, and see, "How does my proposed spouse do with these very basic and primitive conditions?" If you want your marriage to result in long-term wealth accumulation, then there will be times in which you can enjoy luxury as a family, and there will be times in which you will need to tighten your belts and enjoy lack.

And you can, if you marry the right person and you have the right characteristics yourself, you can enjoy luxury and you can enjoy lack. That's what you're looking for. Next, look for someone who has an appreciation of financial reality. Notice I didn't say literacy yet. What I mean is reality.

Your partner needs to be living in the real world. Imagine, your family is deep in debt. You're working day and night to get out of debt, and your wife is out getting multi-hundred dollar beauty treatments, or your family is deep in debt, and you're working day and night to get out, and your husband is out shopping for a new gun, or new three-hundred dollar hunting boots, or whatever it is.

Just imagine, you want to marry someone who can understand reality. Your spouse needs to understand that finances are real and must be respected. You're not made of money. There are limits, and your finances are going to go up and down, and you need to be married to somebody who's willing to respect limits.

In financial counseling, one of the things I've encountered time and time again is a couple who everything was going great until all of a sudden there were limits, and all of a sudden she went out and spent crazy amounts of money on the credit card, or he went out and bought a new truck, or just crazy things like that.

You need to understand that reality and be able to communicate from a perspective of reality, marry somebody who has an appreciation of financial reality. Next, marry somebody who has good financial literacy, an understanding of the basics of financial literacy, and a willingness to learn. I started with the big genetic things that can't be overcome in someone's lifetime.

Then I moved on to the things that probably were sewed into your prospective spouse for twenty years by his or her upbringing. Financial literacy, I would say, again, can be taught in six weeks to six months. Almost everything can be taught in weeks to months that's related to the day-to-day running of financial affairs.

It's important, but this is the most easily overcomable thing, especially if you have willingness to learn. If the person that you are interested in is not good with money, whatever that means, I would not automatically disqualify that person. I don't think being good with money is a particularly difficult hurdle to overcome if all these other things are there.

There are lots of people who are not good with money and a few years later they're multi-millionaires. These are the learnable, easily acquirable skills if somebody has a willingness to learn. Having a willingness to learn and an interest in financial topics is enormously helpful. Remember this. In order for you to become wealthy, your family is going to have to optimize at least something in order to make that happen, assuming that you're not inheriting wealth.

You can optimize for income, you can optimize for low expenses, or you can optimize for investment, prowess, and knowledge. Any one of those things optimized will work. If you can optimize two of them, it'll work fast. And then if you can optimize three of them, you've got a slam-dunk, home-run, shortcut to wealth.

How's that for a mixed metaphor, huh? The point is that you've got to optimize something. And so you want to think about where the interests are of each spouse and think about where would be the optimization. How are we going to work together as a team? And then is my spouse willing to learn?

Is there an expression of willingness? I think it works really well in marriages for individualized to specialize in at least one of those dimensions, again, income, expenses, or investments. The most frustrating, almost guaranteed failure is this. How could you be married and probably not generate much wealth? I would say it's probably if you have a dual-income family who are earning average amounts of money at a W-2 job, spending most of their money on consumption, and if they're investing at all, investing poorly based upon hot stock tips.

That's the worst. You have high taxes paid, you have no specialization. Spouse and wives are basically roommates that each contributes a little bit to the pot and each takes out of the pot and there's no function of this thing, this enterprise, this family enterprise isn't going anywhere. If we look at our surroundings, we can see many different models of success as to how a couple can build something that is truly successful.

And there's not only one, there are many models. Here are some of the models that I see most of the time. The first model can be that one spouse optimizes income and the other spouse optimizes the lifestyle and expenses. Where you've seen this historically has been where a husband has optimized income, had a job, earned a lot of money, built a business, worked really hard at it, and his wife manages the house, manages the household and all of the expenses.

Traditionally, in very patriarchal societies, it's very common, husband goes to work, brings home the paycheck, hands his wife the paycheck, she gives him the spending money that she has, and she maintains ironclad control of the family's finances, she invests, she runs the family household budget, she runs the finances, the investment things, she takes care of the children, she does all that stuff.

And he works and provides the income. And that's a very traditional, very successful model that works all around the world. And it's a matter of one spouse optimizing income, the other spouse, usually the wife, optimizing the lifestyle for the family, and then running expenses and running investments. Now if both spouses are going to optimize income, what usually seems to be the case is that both spouses aren't optimizing jobs.

On the contrary, if both spouses are optimizing income, it usually works well if one has flexibility, as in run my own business, have flexible hours. You can make it work if both spouses just have high incomes, but it can be really annoying. I worked a number of years ago with a couple, wonderful couple, wife was a pharmacist, husband was a physical therapist, they both were really good at what they did, but they both had jobs where they had to be in the office in a certain number of days.

They had two or three children, and they were working really hard on raising their children, and basically they never had a day off together because they each had to have a day where they were working. And they had babysitters some of the times, but they were very devoted parents, and basically what they gave up is they almost never had a day off together because one of them was working each of the seven days per week.

And that was a really frustrating lifestyle for them. And so what can work well, if both spouses are going to have a job or a career, then one builds more of a flexible business that with ability to adjust hours, the other has the job. That can work. Another one that works is where one spouse really focuses on investments.

This is one I've seen very frequently profiled among wealthy families. Usually husband has a business, does pretty well with business, wife takes care of the home, but has something like a real estate investment business. It can be, it doesn't have to be real estate, it can be anything if she's got an interest in stocks, companies.

I've known a couple of ladies who were into that, but it seems like a very male-dominated field. Real estate seems to really fit with what many women are interested in. My mom was always the queen of buying, getting deals. She loved getting deals. Well, maybe it's a, I don't know, maybe it's an innate female trait to shop for sales and things like that.

Well, you can shop for sales on clothes that your family needs and food that your family needs and you can also shop for sales on investment houses that your family needs. Then it's the same basic instinct, the same basic skills just extrapolated out to a bigger level. So, having one spouse be really focused on optimizing the investments can work really well.

I've seen this with husbands as well. Remember that with investing there's a point in time in which your income is the most important factor. Then as your wealth starts to grow, then now your investing prowess becomes the most important thing. So, the amount of money in your portfolio once you have a lot of assets is much more important than the amount of income that you're earning and contributing to the portfolio.

So husband really takes a deep interest in the investment portfolio. Wife has a job. I've seen this a lot of times with people who have a passion jobs and like school teaching. Husband trades stocks every morning, spends his time at home trading stocks. Wife is a school teacher. They have a really great life together.

She works for the social outlet of it and his investment work runs kind of the family enterprise. You can make many different models work. The key principle is this. Look for a spouse that complements you, not simply duplicates you. One of the things I learned that makes for a successful business partnership is that in order for a business partnership to work for the long term, the partners have to believe that they're better off together than apart.

There has to be a synergy to their relationship where one plus one is more than two. If you have a partner who's really good at repairing and refinishing wooden floors and he's friends with someone else who's really good at repairing and refinishing wooden floors and they say, "Hey, tell you what, let's team up together and let's go out and build a business where we go and repair and refinish wooden floors just because we're both good at repairing and refinishing wooden floors," that's probably not a partnership that's destined for long term success.

It's fun in the short term because we can do floors together. We like being together. It's fun. But then five years in, one of the partners wants to work six days a week and the other wants to work four days a week. One wants to start at six and go till six.

The other wants to start at ten and go till four. And we start to have a frustration about, "Wait a second. Why don't you want to do as many floors as I do?" And unless there's just this amazingly strong compatibility of personality, they start to suspect that they're probably better off by themselves because after all, why are we splitting the profit when in reality I could be making more and keeping more if I just did it on my own.

We don't add to each other. Those partnerships don't work. What does work is if you really like refinishing wooden floors and I really like selling and finding clients, then we have a match made in heaven because I can go out and I can spend my time selling and having clients.

You can spend your time running the floor polisher or the floor polishing crews and both of us do what we like and we don't have to do what we don't like. And if I manage all the books for you and I manage the sales and all you got to do is show up and do floors, then you're happy.

And on the other hand, if I don't ever have to do floors but I get to do what I like, then we're happy and we realize we're better off together. I think the same principle applies to spousal relationships. Husbands and wives that complement one another, that bring different skill sets, different personalities, a hardness, a softness, a skill here that complements that skill there.

And from a financial perspective, brings a different variety. These couples seem to, I think, really work because they provide what each other provides. There's no magic formula for this. I think here is where you're going to, I would revert to say, you'll know how someone makes you feel. I think that some couples, when I listen to them, they love to talk about work at the dinner table because they work in the same field and they work amazingly well together.

I always think about Will Durant and his wife who he married very young and they just were this lifetime team duo of incredibly publishing. They just love their work together and they seem to have a productive marriage. But then there's people who just don't ever want to talk about business with my wife because that's not what she's into.

It's not what I'm into. I talk about business with other people but they also have really productive relationships. I don't know of any rule that is the best key. I just think that you want to have complementary skill sets. Any success model can work. The ones I see work most frequently are the ones where the husband optimizes the income and the income generation and the wife optimizes the expense management, the lifestyle management, making sure the children are doing their homework so they're going to go to the elite schools where they're going to meet smart women and all of the stuff and super hardcore on that.

And then investment knowledge can go either way based on interest. I've seen it where wives just are wizards with investments. I've seen it the other way around. So meaning where the husband's that's totally their deal. You're going to at the end of the day there are no rules in this stuff.

You work it out with your spouse and that's where a good relationship is important. Finally I would say look for values that are related to financial productivity, cultural values. Seeing hard work as a virtue, not as a vice, is probably a good sign to look for. Imagine you're a young woman and you see a man who just sees that his goal in life is to escape from hard work and he's doing everything he can to get out of hard work and to shirk it.

Probably not a good marker of long term success. Seeing hard work as a virtue, not a vice, is a good thing. Same thing for a man looking for a woman. Seeing a woman who embraces hard work as something to be appreciated and to be enjoyed, that's a good indicator.

Being employed as a sign of good health is a good indicator. A guy who's running from employment just doesn't want to work, it's probably not going to work out so well in the long term. He'll make just enough money to make it for a few weeks and then be done.

On the other hand, a guy who sees being employed as a fundamentally healthy thing to do, probably going to make more money and be more employed. Seeing frugality as a healthy discipline, not something to be run from, is good. Most historically successful cultures have some expression of asceticism. It can be fasting, it can be some way where you're denying yourself and I think that frugality can express some of those aspects of fasting that are really healthy for us, that we spend less than we could spend.

It's a good and useful discipline. Seeing risk-taking as something to be admired is something that could result in great wins, could result in great losses. You be the choice. The choice is yours. What do you want? But a culture of that. And there's many, many other things, but look for values that are related to financial productivity.

On the whole, as you are considering somebody that you're interested in marrying, recognize that you're getting the whole package. There's a good chance that the person that you're marrying is not going to change much. Your children are kind of going to be like this person that you're marrying. So think about that.

When you're looking for a wife, what are the qualities that you want in your sons and daughters? Because that's what you're going to get. So make sure that you're marrying someone of those qualities. If you're looking for a husband, what are the qualities that you want in your sons and daughters?

Guess what? You're going to get them. They're going to be like the person that you're marrying. People don't change that much. And so look at the family, look at the circumstances, and recognize that there's a good chance statistically speaking that the results that I get are probably going to be something like this, like what I see, and people probably aren't going to change very much.

So if you like these qualities that this person is expressing, great. Nail them down. Nail her down. Get to marriage as quickly as you can. If you don't like these qualities, look for another option. If you don't have another better option, then either continue to look, figure out how can I bring more potential candidates into my life?

How can I create a better sales funnel with more prospects? Or how can I upgrade myself in order to be more attractive to the kind of person that I want to attract? If you want to attract as a man, if you want to attract a 10 out of 10, a woman who is going to be just drop dead gorgeous, she's going to fit in in every social situation, she's going to look phenomenal in a ball gown, and just as cute when she wakes up sleeping on the dirt next to you on the Appalachian Trail, and she's going to bear you 10 children, and they're all going to go to Ivy League education, and she's going to teach them French and Latin and history and mathematics and calculus, and she's incredibly smart, and she's got two advanced degrees, but she's going to give it all up for you to be your doting loving wife, guess what?

She's out there, and you got to be a 10 out of 10 to attract her, because she's got every option in the world. So you're going to have to be mega focused on being as attractive as you possibly can, working as diligently as possible to meet her, and to meet her young before she takes the cream of the crop from somewhere else.

If you're a woman, and you're trying to tie down a man, and you just want a guy who's going to make a million dollars a year, and he's six foot four, and he's got a ripped six pack, and he loves you and wants to spend many, many hours a week with you, and all the – you make your list, recognize you're going to have to figure out what he wants, and you're going to have to figure out how to develop that and offer that to him.

And anywhere in the middle, you can't change the other person, but you can change yourself. You can change yourself and what you have to offer, what you bring to the table, and you can change the environments you put yourself in where you're most likely to meet this person. Every single aspect of this is a skill.

Social things, skills. Money management, skills. Academic abilities, skills. There certainly seem to be basic inborn differences among us. Some of us are smarter, some of us are stronger, some of us are bigger, some of us are smaller, some of us are prettier, some of us are not. You work with what you got, and you enhance it to the absolute maximum.

But don't be scared to set standards for what you're looking for. If you want to be wealthy in the long term, marry a spouse that is going to make it probable that you are wealthy. So go ahead, set your standards. Marry somebody who's going to make it happen, who's going to make that likely.

But you're going to have to step up and develop yourself if you're just not naturally, innately gifted on those levels. I hope this has been useful for you. Take whatever is useful, discard the rest. Take it and talk about it. We've got a lot of work to do within our families, within our local cultures, and more broadly, because it's our responsibility to help younger people to think.

We've got to cultivate and fix some of the problems that our society has created. And if you're younger, just know I'm doing my best to fulfill my responsibility to give you useful thoughts. Again, take what's useful, discard the rest. You can do it. You can find somebody if you'll work on these things, and you can find someone that's going to result in your having long-term financial success in addition to all of the other important areas of success.

I'll be back with you very soon.