How to find a husband (and why you should want one)

Part 1 of How to find a husband

So I got married recently. I’ve decided to take his name, so this blog is going to be now under the name Aria Schrecker.

Here is a picture of us at our wedding.

No, we didn’t spend our wedding night in a luxury Teepee

To maintain his impeccable SEO I’m not going to name him but here’s his CV.

• Oxbridge graduate

• Successful career with a very good long-term earning potential

• Lots of friends, both men and women

• A good relationship with his family

• A good person – thoughtful, kind, has a backbone, seeks to improve the world in measurable ways

• Has good relationship skills e.g. he disagrees well, controls his emotions etc

• Wants children

• 6ft1, in shape, handsome

• Reads books and is cultured and knowledgeable about a range of things

• Has hobbies – walking (or ‘hiking’ in American English), plays several instruments, cooks, climbs)

• No mental or physical health problems

• All his grandparents lived into their 90s (other people don’t think this is important but they should)

• Good social skills that work in a range of settings

• Demonstrates the kind of masculine virtue that people are aiming for when they talk about ‘getting the ick’

• Romantic, considerate, kind

I basically found someone who has the full checklist of things that most people want. Though I am a catch, I’m not as obviously desirable as my husband is. And, as we all know, there are way more university educated women than men. It’s tough out there. So how did I find him?

I had a very methodical process. My main skill is that I think strategically about things other people do on autopilot. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this question. It is, after all, the most important thing I will ever do in my life.

This is a multi part series. I’ve written most of it and I plan to publish weekly. This is the list I’ve roughly drafted so far, but I expect it to change in response to comments.

• You should want a husband

• You’ll probably die alone

• The wall is real but not for the reasons you think

• Don’t trust your gut

• A mathematical approach to settling

• In defence of settling

• 7 Rules for using the Aria method

• What traits should you look for

• How to be prettier

• How to dress

• How to act sexier

• Men’s preferences are legitimate

• Use the apps. Move to a big city. It’s not the 1990s anymore.

• Design your best dating app profile

• How to give a good first date

• Are you too cooked to fancy anyone?

• Datemaxing motivation

• Make him chase

• How to act wifeable

• Yes, you should be good in bed

• Ambient, low effort sexiness

• The fuckboy plague

• The dating to boyfriend pipeline

• Who should you prioritise

• Dump early dump often

• The boyfriend to husband pipeline

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Part 1: You should want a husband

Finding a spouse should be the number one priority in your life.

The right partner will make every other goal in your life easier to achieve.

If your priority is your career, you will probably be more successful with a well-chosen spouse. In some cases this will be a partner in a similar field and you guys can pass each other networks and gossip. In some cases you may prefer someone who is willing to put their career on the backburner and support you by taking care of everything else in your life.

If you’re aiming for success in politics, or the arts, or you work tirelessly for a really important altruistic cause, then marrying someone with a steady income will make you able to take the risks you need to.

Of course, if you plan on having children, the right partner makes all the difference. Your children are literally half your husband’s and will be full of his DNA. If your husband is attractive but kind of lazy, then your kids will on average be a bit attractive and a bit lazy. If your husband is funny and intelligent but has a mean streak, then your kids will probably be a little like that too.

And while most enterprising women can probably think up a way to get the sperm they need to make a baby, a conscientious pair of hands from a highly invested individual is harder to come by.

Even if you just want hedonic pleasure, you’re probably better off with a spouse than without. Sure, if you’re a socially normal twenty-or-thirty-something, then being carefree and single is pretty great. But, you’ll grow old regardless of whether you get married.

At some point, you’ll stop being hot and single and become an old maid. And you will go on to spend more of your life as an old maid than as a hot and single lady. You should resist the marshmallow and spend the currency of youth on securing happiness in your future. Also married people are happier. People who value hedonism should take this consistent and cross-cultural finding seriously.

As long term trends show that only functional people are deciding to get married and everyone is getting lonelier, we should expect the hedonistic returns to marriage to improve.

But, this is the wrong way to think about life and I disavow it. Your priorities when you’re young and single are different to what they will be when you’re older. You should expect to value sex and social status less than you do now. As you get older, you should predict that you will want children more than you do now. And you should expect to want more children than the number you end up having.

I’m addressing the small number of people who don’t want to get married because they want to maximise some other value because I understand that way of thinking. At a formative age I read too many books about teenagers who save the world. On some level I believe I should be optimising for one Very Important Thing and anything that doesn’t aid the Very Important Thing is a distraction and any person of strong character would jettison those meaningless distractions in a heartbeat. Some might call it autism. Whatever it is, it is the psychological disposition that draws people to eating disorders and Effective Altruism. (Two things I continue to dabble in from time to time.)

In the general imagination, genius comes with obsessiveness. We think incredibly successful people are also incredibly driven and are willing to sacrifice their personal lives for their success. This is one of the many memes brought to you by the just world fallacy.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Patrick Collison is not just obsessed with payments. He’s happily married, widely read, and strong. Taylor Swift bakes and hangs out for days with her aging parents.

Ironically, the small number of people I know who have dedicated everything in their life to one thing, usually something professional, are weird and unlikeable in ways that affect their professional success. The one time I met an actually successful person whose whole life was about one thing, he was later arrested for fraud. (And he was still weird and unlikeable.)

Diversify your fulfilment. Also, put your savings in an index tracker.

Hardly anyone is better off without a life partner. Maybe 1% of the population. Loads of people, on the other hand, are wrong about themselves and their romantic preferences. Most people learn really crucial things about love as they get older and they try out a few relationships. If you think you’re better off alone, you’re more likely to wrong about yourself than you are to be a freak. Noted asexual freak (complimentary) Scott Alexander is happily married.

“I don’t need a husband, just a boyfriend”

It’s true that you can get basically everything I’ve described from having a long term committed partner. So why do you, in 2026, need a ring?

I talk about finding a husband because I’m talking about finding someone who is committed to you for the rest of your life. Due to the legality of no-fault divorce and a society that will not ostracise people for reneging on their marital vows — marriage is actually just a piece of paper. But, despite that, marriage is doing better than ever.

The world is complicated and you are unpredictable. But! It does have trends! For some reason, the people who decide to get married are better at staying together. Maybe it’s just because marrying-types are more conscientious and actually getting married does nothing. Or maybe it’s because society at large reinforces their relationship in ways that make a meaningful difference. Maybe it’s because the legal faff involved with separation provides just enough friction to hold some couples together. Maybe it’s because, even if you think it’s no big deal when you do it, going back on a promise you made in public is shameful to you. I make no claims about why marriage works, I’m simply observing that it does.

I don’t think you can be so certain that marriage is just a piece of paper that it isn’t worth doing, just in case you’re wrong.

In truth, I suspect many of the people who refuse to get married are quietly maintaining their outside options, they are trying to save face because the person they want to marry is dragging their feet, or despite the outward appearance of felicity, the relationship has serious issues and both parties suspect they are headed for splitsville.

Don’t let the propaganda from these fools con you out of longterm happiness.