Opportunity cost Sorry for the lapse in posts, but I just survived three days of the worst state-mandated teacher training ever. By the end it was impoverished enough to be classified as a variant of the Brezhnev-era Soviet economy: we stopped pretending to work and the instructor didn’t pretend to care.

So I found myself sitting around with three other teachers just talking. Three of us are guys, and one is a woman—a tall, svelte, Nordic-jawed strawberry blond in her thirties. She reviewed the male movie stars she fantasized about during the boring training lectures, and then complained that there are no eligible single guys around. We guys were all instinctively doubtful of this claim, and one of us made some sort of gesture in the direction of implying that we ourselves were not dogmeat. She had to point out to us that we are all married. Oh yeah.

It may have been insensitive of her position to forget that we were married, and therefore tragically unavailable, but I think my collegue was reaching for a kind of point. Had she found any of us before our wives did, with her looks, there is no question that she could have had us. So we can fairly assume she has overlooked any number of guys with overall ratings akin to ours. I think this dulled our sympathy.

It is probably hard for her now, with fewer unmarried male cohorts. But everyone has to make a choice. Our wives made a sacrifice: they deferred gratification. At the age they were when they found us, and in the state they found us in, our worth was not exactly backed by gold. It was like the floating currency of a minor nation, perhaps one lead by a man who likes to award himself medals in elaborate ceremonies.

I’m not willing to make a strong claim as to our worth now, even as we earn stable incomes, father their children, reap the benefits of psychological therapy and are capable, after years of their tutelage, of dressing ourselves. Monogamy is a bitch, and the initial investment is made blind.

I shared this with my wife, and she suggested that nobody could get married if they didn’t go into it blind. The whole truth of it would be too terrible to bear, she says, so you have to do it when you are young and stupid, or made stupid by love. If you wait so long that you smarten up, it becomes more difficult.  ¶ 8:58 AM