C,

I agree. Our culture reifies romance and marriage, but part of that reification is that they willingly overlook the cost of it. The majority of marriages fail, and the bad failures leave a lot of devastation in their wake.

If you view marriage from the angle of the marital ideal, it sounds wonderful. However, if you strip it from its ideal and view it instead in light of the numbers, it looks like a coin toss, with roughly equal odds of making a person feel happy vs. devastating them.

I would not blame you if you decide that you do not want to flip that coin. I have generally avoided it. I still think I would, given the right circumstances, but I am not inclined to go out and be hasty about it just because people paint a rosy picture.

J