Selecting A Spouse

No one is ready for marriage unless they are a rationalist.  Irrational people cannot deserve to be happy in their delusions and in relationships based on them of reason, which is inherently true, morally matters.  If anything matters, reason must as well since it is what governs the rest of reality.  If nothing matters, no one deserves anything at all, certainly not happiness.  However, just because someone is a rationalist does not mean that they will not land in the unlikely place of a relationship they or their partner were absolutely not prepared for (whether in the sense of intellectual and moral correctness or in the sense of personal psychology).

Even a thorough rationalist could paradoxically wind up trapped in a marriage with an irrationalist simply because he or she truly has no way of knowing other minds, hoping that someone is as they appear and discovering that it was never likely the case.  It is logically possible for someone to hide their irrationalism even by accident, just as it is possible for someone to change after they get married and become an emotionalistic, selfish, abusive, or philosophically apathetic husband or wife after commitment was formed.  There is absolutely never a way to prove that someone else is or will remain a rational partner, the only kind of person who could possibly be worthy of marriage or of existing at all, and this is an unrecognized truth for many cases.

There is no number of conversations or other activities that confirm that someone truly loves you or, more importantly, is truly rational.  Only one's own mind is knowable when it comes to its existence and when it comes to its contents.  No matter how many talks or expressions of seeming or genuine love or rationality there are, a non-telepathic being will never actually know anything more than possibilities, probabilities, and perceptions of what another person is thinking, as well as what would logically follow if a given thing is true about them.  Anyone who heads into friendship or marriage thinking otherwise is undeserving of having either in the first place since they have disregarded reason, that which all else hinges on.

What if a spouse does descend into madness or was already there unnoticed?  There is, in one sense, not always a Biblically valid escape for all spouses from their marriage.  Only sinful interpersonal acts qualify for divorce, and these acts are far broader than many Christians think (these imbeciles do not understand the Torah or how the New Testament is but conditional upon it, as affirmed by the likes of Matthew 5:17-19): deeds like abuse or neglect (Exodus 21), abandonment (1 Corinthians 7), sexual immorality such as adultery or rape (Matthew 19), and general sin (Deuteronomy 24).  This true scope of Biblical divorce is liberating indeed, but it is not all-encompassing.  Non-sins do not merit divorce, as difficult as they might be to deal with.

Marriage, like deep non-marital friendships, is nothing to rush into.  Still, only a fool would think they could know that someone is actually rational, just, or loving as opposed to somehow saying all the right words and acting outwardly as if this facade is the case.  This makes marriage nothing to rush into even with someone who genuinely towers above the superficiality and unworthiness of so many people.  A total, unflinching rationalist and devotee of Yahweh could find himself or herself tethered to someone they should never have stayed involved with for logical, moral, personal, and even pragmatic reasons.  This would be terrifying to any rational person.