How to get Married. Risk versus Reward.

The title here is a bit misleading as it makes it sound like a serious post on the risks and rewards of getting married. I know about neither. So I will instead talk about the relation of risk and reward. It is the basic concept of investing in the stock market. The more you invest, the higher the risk, but the higher the reward could be. Or it is like going for it on 4th down.* You might not make it, but if you do, the reward can be high.

I know that many of you are married. She/He loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah......so I think it's only fair to apologize in advance for writing about something you already know volumes about. But I guess that one faithful and unmarried follower reads this stuff to his household, so I had to put in something for him.

Back in the day, when Pluto was still a planet, I had a roommate named TimTim. He was unmarried, which was good for me (since then he would not have been my roommate), but bad for him (since then he could have avoided being my roommate). At times, TimTim would lament the fact that he was not married. We would counsel him as he lay in bed. Now this was a sort of blind leading the blind type of counseling, but I remember one time where we discussed "equilibrium based, gamble state economics." This is a fancy and superfluous phrase for "high risk equals high reward."  But I believe the first phrase was the actual one used since TimTim was rather cerebral. It was decided that he should call Sister Black (Since she had black hair like Madeline in Granite Flats. Although this well predates GF) in our ward and ask her on a date. This was a massive gamble as her Facebook status was "it's complicated" and she was some sort of "dream girl" for many a lad. I actually do not even remember if TimTim called her, but I do remember having this conversation.

In later conversations on this topic, we also began to wonder what would happen if we went to the "big open space" on campus and held up a sign saying "I am a great guy, please marry me." This would be a very risky proposition. But heck, if that went down, nobody could deny you trumped all "How I met my spouse" stories. And all you had to do was buy a poster board and a Sharpie. High risk, high reward. This is pretty much what Tinder is. And supposedly it works for some people. (I have never used Tinder. Honest to goodness.)

With that as a preface (it comprising nearly half of the post), let me now speak on the impetus for this post. As I have become more "aged" (meaning all my roommates are now married and I have not had a roommate older than me for something like 2 years now), people have begun to give me more suggestions on how to get married.

Truth be told, it is sort of like a parabola (concave up). When I first got back from my mission, everyone had a suggestion of how to get married. Sometimes they knew a "perfect girl" for me. Then they gave up for five years, and now it has started again. People have now realized that my situation is dire and that all hope is lost. Or something. The suggestions I have received as of late have become stranger. And more based in "gamble state economics." Maybe this is indicative of what the situation has come to. It will take random cosmological events to win the game. Their little deterministic game has failed and all that can save me now is a bending of both space and time to nontesseral methodologies.  

One person informed me they knew of a dream girl for me. And when they say dream girl, they mean they actually had a dream that I should meet this unknown girl. But again, perhaps this is the quintessential aspect I am missing: I do not gamble enough. Instead of just calling a girl I already know and getting shot down (Thrice), I should text a girl I do not know (after finding out her phone number from H.U.G.  because his sister went to elementary school with this dream girl).  Of course I might shame several generations of my family if it failed, but on the flip side, if the whole "text random girl in other state" thing worked, I could finally get them to stop talking about me at every family gathering I am not at.

So, from now on, perhaps I am going to shoot for high risk, high reward types of pursuits. Just you wait, pretty soon here you will be getting an announcement about my marriage to a foreign girl that I met after storming the field during a football game. Sure, this is high risk, but maybe the person arresting me will be an Italian beauty with whom I have an instant connection. Wish me luck, because if this fails, Tinder would be my only option. And we don't want that.

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*How to do 4th down. If you have the ball and 25 yards to go, call a draw play. If they have the ball, allow them to gain 15 yards after five broken shoe tackles. This is the strategy I hear.