Due Diligence Before You Marry

When you rent an apartment, all the landlord truly cares about is, (1) will you be able to pay the rent, (2) are you going to trash the apartment, and (3) are you going to turn the dining room into a meth-lab. So if the landlord has even a walnut sized brain, before they lease the apartment to you, they run credit and criminal background checks on you. If all checks out, you get the apartment.

The landlord does not care if you are pretty.

When you meet a woman and start thinking about moving from a non-serious relationship into a serious one, all you tend to automatically care about is whether or not she is pretty.

If you don’t check her out fully and are lucky, she also happens to be able to (1) hold a job, (2) help keep the house clean, and (3) is fairly healthy. Enjoy the sweet beauty of true love and romance.

But if you didn’t check her out fully and are unlucky, she (1) has some sort of serious money and/or employment issue, (2) is only slightly more housebroken than a flock of geese, and (3) has some sort of major health or addiction issue. Which means you’re screwed.

As an example of one of those “little surprises” that one learns about after the wedding, Jennifer had $17,000 in student loans that I had no clue about. After the initial shock I moved on fairly quickly as I got to understand the American college expenses better and it’s not like Jennifer was living some kind of lavish party girl lifestyle at college. Plus by this time I was married already, so it’s past the point of no return to decide whether or not $17,000 was going to be a deal breaker in marrying her anyway. It’s not like I could two months into the marriage, suddenly take the moral high ground and say “you withheld need to know information from me” and high tail it back to New Zealand. Especially not after I had just fled New Zealand to avoid paying my student loan.

So while I do believe romantic love is a wonderful thing and an important part of a happy marriage, it isn’t enough by itself to have a happy marriage. The purpose of marriage is to have a functional, productive and happy life together. So in order to do that, you need to marry a functional, productive and happy person. Plus you need to be one yourself.

At the very least you should do some basic due diligence and find out about your partners credit, criminal and health histories before you sign on the dotted line and legally bind yourself to them.

Wikipedia – “Due diligence” is a term used for a number of concepts involving either an investigation of a business or person prior to signing a contract, or an act with a certain standard of care. It can be a legal obligation, but the term will more commonly apply to voluntary investigations. A common example of due diligence in various industries is the process through which a potential acquirer evaluates a target company or its assets for acquisition.

If nothing else, sneak a look in her damn medicine cabinet and see if she has a little city of Batshit Crazy meds in there.