Love in the time of compound interest, pt. 2: everything that will go wrong with marriage and why you should do it anyway

Part two of a two-part guide to understanding love through capitalism.

I missed the last big wedding I was invited to because I had an econometrics final while I was living in Amsterdam. I’m now using that degree to write an essay about why marriage is a bad investment. I’m still not over it, and I don’t mean the econometrics.

In the part one essay, Love in the Time of Cap Tables, I made the case that marriage is angel investing. You’re betting your entire emotional portfolio on one unproven asset with no liquidity, no diversification, and a 50% historical failure rate.

Here’s what’s coming in part two where I go more deeply into how angel investing is like marriage through founder-market fit, runway, and all the due diligence you didn’t do and forgot about because they always made you laugh.

If we survive the audit, the return on investment becomes our focus. This is important considering that I have tried to examine all the reasons one should not marry. God, there were so many.

Servant and master: founder-market fit, runway, and the due diligence nobody does

Founder-market fit, runway, and detailed due diligence form the elements of angel investing that are crucial to ensuring compatibility between check writer and check recipient, just like in marriage.

Founder-market fit is a venture capital concept that asks whether this specific founder is the right person to build this specific company. In marriage, founder-market fit means values beyond “we both like dogs.” Do you have compatible values and goals, or just both hate the same people? Are you force multipliers together and apart? What even is a force multiplier in one person and should I be scared or should I want to participate on an episode of Iron Chef with them?

The type of fit here does not involve the clothing you’re wearing but it includes the unglamorous stuff like handling between your partner and yourself cleanliness standards, time management, domestic labor expectations and more. It also means you need to have actually fought and recovered. Not little spats about dinner plans, but real conflict about real things. You haven’t really vetted someone until you’ve seen them handle a parent dying, a job loss, a serious illness, or assembling IKEA furniture.

When you skip this assessment, what you get is values drift. You wake up one morning and the person next to you voted for someone you find morally reprehensible, or decided they don’t want kids anymore, or underwent a religious awakening you weren’t invited to, or just became someone whose daily priorities are so misaligned with yours that you’re essentially running two different companies under the same roof and neither of you filed for a spin-off because the paperwork is too expensive and the kids have school on Monday.

Runway in startup terms means how many months you can keep going before you run out of cash. In relationship terms, it means how fast you’re depleting each other’s emotional resources versus replenishing them. If someone’s burn rate in the first year of dating requires your constant attention, emotional regulation, and energy management, that’s not love. That’s a pitch from a company that’s already insolvent.

And the sunk cost fallacy eats you alive. Five years in, can’t leave now. Ten years, definitely trapped. Twenty years, might as well die together since we’ve been dead inside already a long time.

Then there’s everything else nobody wants to audit but will pay for later: generational trauma you’re inheriting, attachment patterns, legal and financial history disclosed post-merger. The $80K in student loans mentioned on the honeymoon between bites of room service like it’s a fun fact about themselves. You could have screened for some of this. You didn’t, because you were in love and love is just oxytocin cosplaying as wisdom and we’ve established this.

When it comes to people, past performance IS usually indicative of future results unless there’s been a serious intervention with receipts. But past performance also means you could be completely bamboozled.

The person you married might not exist. And even if they do, people change, or they catastrophically don’t. The person perfect at 28 might be insufferable at 38 because you grew and they calcified. Or worse, they’re exactly the same, and you’re now married to a monument of who someone used to be and you can feel yourself dying inside a little every time they tell that same story about the time they almost went to law school.

All of which sounds thorough until you remember that nobody actually does any of this. And even if you did every check listed above, there are risks that no due diligence on earth can screen for. For example, your partner or yourself could die tomorrow in a random accident or on a Thursday at the grocery store. Between the unseen risks and all the various stressors which will test you and your partner throughout shifting scenarios, lives become intertwined.

That’s how for example the inability to exit cleanly also becomes a risk via a contested divorce, custody wars, assets so entangled you need forensic accountants, mediators facilitating conversations between two people who used to cuddle and now can’t agree on who gets the holiday weekends. There’s a saying that goes: you know who you marry but you don’t know who you’re divorcing.

Enjoy the silence: ROI, or what you get if your marriage does not implode

It’s not all negative, however, since we’ve now arrived at the part of the deal anatomy for angel investing and in marriage where people get happy, if not greedy: ROI, which stands for return on investment, meaning what you actually get back for what you put in.

In most investments, returns are measured in money. In marriage, returns are measured through material and immaterial gains or losses. It’s also deeply context specific to the people involved, as I also don’t believe success in marriage and relationships is something that is as broadcast as its opposite is (the emperor has no clothes, but we insist you see it. Over and over and over until you believe it, like we’ve made ourselves believe it..). That also means success in marriage/relationships is arguably quiet, quiet doesn’t go viral, and so we have to use our imaginations.

The returns, when they materialize, are arguably the only investment class that compounds across most if not every dimension of a human life simultaneously. Nothing else does this. Not your portfolio. Not your career. Not your friendships, not your therapist, not what you say to Clawdbot when no one is looking.

You become braver because someone is watching. Not in the Instagram quote way but in the way where you quit the job that was making you someone you didn’t want to be and there was a person in your kitchen that night who said we’ll figure it out and meant it, and you could tell they meant it because you know what their face looks like when they’re lying and this wasn’t that face.

You become more grounded because someone calls your bullshit. Not your friends who are too polite or too invested in their own narrative of you. Not your parents who cannot see you clearly because they made you. Your partner, who has to live with the downstream consequences of your self-deception and therefore has standing to say you were wrong and you know you were wrong and we both know you were wrong so can we skip the part where you pretend you weren’t.

You become sharper because proximity produces friction and friction produces clarity if you let it and most people don’t let it because clarity is uncomfortable but the ones who do, the ones who let their partner’s observations actually land, those people become terrifying. They become the most effective version of themselves because someone who loves them won’t let them be lazy about who they are.

A good partner halves the existential load. This is of course not always the reality or concrete manifestation of a partnership, but in theory, there is massive alpha in marriage if it works. When I say they halve the existential load (phrasing), I mean not in the codependent golden retriever glued to you way, not in the “I can’t function without you” way, but in the structural way where your material and immaterial being is guarded by the welcomed addition of another.

Also, in this economy? Yeah, people pair up, have you seen housing prices, my god.

There are no guarantees in life, and of course these are assumptions, but generally speaking, two incomes are better than none and certainly a buffer against job loss. Two decision-makers catch blind spots and I don’t know, I mean I’m not imagining a movie montage, but it can be something as innocuous as telling you there’s lipstick on your teeth right before you head out of the house, or something as significant as telling you that you’re about to make a decision out of fear and not ambition, and you can’t see it yourself because you’re inside it.

There’s alpha and then there’s massive alpha.

This co-founder dynamic (ideally, in theory, almost Platonic really) begets two emotional processors as well, meaning perhaps someone’s stable when the other is actively disintegrating. And people! Disintegration is not optional, it’s coming for everyone, the question is only whether someone is there when it happens. My point is that you’re not splitting weakness with the right partner, you’re compounding resilience, and this is something good co-founders do together just like a good marriage.

This is the co-founder dividend as it applies to marriage, but wait, there’s more still: there’s returns nobody can quantify but nobody can replicate without the specific person who generates them. Put more simply, it’s your partner’s institutional memory. It’s their siloed knowledge of you that no one else has. It’s someone who knows your complete operating history for better or for worse, all of it, the version you present publicly and the version that exists at 3am when you can’t sleep.

This could be:

Your tells.

Your triggers.

Your traumas.

Your terrors.

You as a terror.

How a Yorkshire Terrier once bit you (terrifying, truly).

And much, much more.

This is the person who sees right through you without pretense or imposition to manipulate, control, or change you, but who does this with the grace of sheer acceptance for who you are, who you have been, and who you are becoming.

This is itself terrifying for many people, but imagine being on the other side and seeing yourself from their perspective. That’s compounding trust, which is the ROI of being fully known and still chosen - not just loved, but chosen, actively, daily, with full information.

And when it ends, or they die, a version of you dies with them, which is the version only they knew. It’s quite intimate, isn’t it?

It’s the version only they could verify, the version of yourself seen through someone else’s eyes, and that too is gone, poof, up in the air. There’s no instrument for this.

Meanwhile, your stock portfolio doesn’t remember the name of your first cat. Treasury bonds don’t hold you when you’re shaking. I guess you could theoretically try to cuddle a Bloomberg terminal as a self-soothing mechanism but I just recommend you do what I do which is just wash dishes to feel better about whatever subconscious need for control you’re failing to fulfill at the moment.

But that’s me avoiding the point.

The asymmetry here is violent in both directions: catastrophic, life-destroying, therapy-requiring downside that we just spent several thousand words documenting. But upside that touches every dimension of your life in ways no other single decision can reach. There is no other asset class like this. There never will be. As far as I can abstract it, though our AI overlords may have a say in a brave new world of Clawdbot officiated ceremonies or whatever.

There is no other social instrument like marriage that offers returns and destruction across financial, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and existential dimensions simultaneously, which is exactly why people keep making the bet despite everything.

Never let me down again: hope is the investment thesis of my being, tbh, which is why I encourage yearning

We’ve walked the entire deal anatomy. The instrument: marriage is an unregulated startup with two co-founders, no business plan, and a term sheet written in iambic pentameter. The thesis: irrational conviction plus existential hedging plus something that can’t be modeled. The due diligence: theoretically comprehensive, practically nonexistent, because humans are horny and delusional and convinced they’re the exception. The risk assessment: everything that can go wrong will, and several things you didn’t think of will also go wrong, and the exit will cost more than the entry. The return profile: if it works, and that’s a massive if, it compounds across every dimension of human life in a way nothing else can touch.

This is objectively the worst investment strategy ever conceived. Typically completely undiversified (even if you want to delude yourself into thinking this is a 17th century French court and your open relationship harem polycule co-op isn’t manipulating you), your entire emotional and financial portfolio is in one position. You’re potentially illiquid for decades.

Exit penalties include emotional damage that will fuel organic employment ecosystems of their own in supporting therapists and lawyers.

And none of it matters anyway, because you’re still subject to black swan events like your spouse becoming a completely different person over a single calendar year, or waking up one morning and realizing you can no longer recognize each other across the breakfast table, or meeting a woman like me, which should strike deep, deep, deep fear into everyone’s heart.

But we do it anyway. Because the alternative is dying alone with a diversified portfolio and nobody to leave it to (you can always pledge to my Substack if that’s the case, don’t worry). Or because sometimes you meet someone whose specific configuration of damage complements yours so perfectly that not investing would be like knowing Amazon was going to $3,000 and buying treasury bonds instead for the long-haul.

In angel investing and in marriage, you’re not investing just in a person. You’re investing in a thesis that love is compound interest on initial attraction plus time minus entropy plus whatever’s left after you’d tolerate anything, anything, anything in all the dramarama of such a relationship.

The math will never math. The due diligence will never be sufficient. The risks are genuinely astronomical and I’ve just spent several thousand words proving it.

And yet I still think after everything, everything, everything, you should just kiss these concerns all off into the air because being reckless with your entire emotional capital is worth it. Let me explain.

We’ve established there’s much to lose, some to gain (potentially massive more if played well), and how volatile marriage can be. But we do it anyway. And why would I of all people believe in this still?

The hope is the point. Hope is everything. If hope springs eternal, I’m drinking from the source.

Here’s what I think about hope and I’m going to be honest with you because I’ve been honest this whole time and stopping now would be cowardice. I front-loaded the destruction on purpose. Every section until the ROI was a catastrophe. I made you sit with a 50% failure rate. I made you read about values drift and sunk cost fallacies and the cruelty people are capable of when love curdles. I did that deliberately, so that when we got here, to the hope, you wouldn’t be hoping blind. You’d be hoping to be informed.

Hope that ignores failure is delusion. Hope that follows a complete accounting of failure is a decision. I think this is hope earned. I hope it is.

And isn’t this the same as a founder exit? You yearn, you hope, you build, it busts, things fall apart, life crumbles, and then time still marches on. Something saccharine and supportive still to me about America is this unbridled hope, or delusion, or belief, whatever word you want to use, that comes with failure as an expectation. In Europe it’s a completely different story. Failure there is a scarlet letter. Here it’s a credential. And failing at a business is far different from failing at a relationship, don’t get me wrong. But even in our failure we hope to have retained something from it. Or maybe I’m just really sentimental. But there but for the grace of God go I.

The odds are not in your favor. The odds are not in my favor. The odds of the specific thing I’m hoping for at the moment are decidedly, quantifiably, not in my favor. But they are odds, and I’ll keep my odd lot, dammit.

If it doesn’t work out, well you’re the investor, not the startup. The startup dies, you don’t. You walk away with less than you came in with, and you sit with that for a while, and it’s bad for a while. And then you’re back. Not because you’re brave or healed or optimistic but because you’re the kind of person who stays in the market. I told you previously that I’m a romantic. That wasn’t just a disclaimer. It is my being, damnit.

Personally, I would rather be the kind of person who risked feeling stupid over someone than the kind of person who never felt stupid because she never let herself want anything. That sadness is the cost of admission for being someone who’s still in the market. And being in the market is who I am.

I know what I’m risking. I wrote an entire two-part essay series about it that you’ve now read. And I’m still here telling you to write that angel check and consider that marriage. What does that tell you about me? What does that tell you about hope?

What kind of person keeps hoping when she knows better? This kind. The kind writing this essay. The kind who spent several thousand words proving marriage is insane and then told you to do it anyway.

This kind, you ask me who I am, and I don’t know what to say. Dumb? Not jaded? Aroused? Of course I want it to work out. Who wouldn’t?

I know the terms I wrote about, I know their mechanisms, I know them inside and out conceptually, cerebrally, whatever. But you know what I don’t know? If any of it ever works out for me. Whether it be with my career, a partner, any of it. I don’t know any of that at all. And it is terrifying, breathtakingly awing, but in all my not knowing, the only knowing I have left is that I yearned to yearn and kept yearning, apparently.

So: write the check. Read the fine print. Get the prenup. At least the wedding will have an open bar. You’re going to need it for what comes after.

As for me, I am unmarried, have no plans to get married anytime soon, but damn I love weddings so much as a guest, and I am definitely biased in my intentions disseminating this message encouraging such a risky investment. Yeah I want to attend more weddings, so what. Think of your guests & their happiness, people!!

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’