Nietzsche's (Surprisingly Sound) Advice on Choosing a Spouse | The Art of Manliness

Plenty of advice on what makes for a good, happy marriage has been thrown around for centuries.

Ironically enough, it was a lifelong bachelor, who possessed rather ambivalent feelings on the institution, who offered some of the very best insights on this front.

Friedrich Nietzsche never walked down the aisle himself, though he proposed marriage multiple times, to the same woman, who rejected each of his overtures. Perhaps, as may have been the case with Thoreau as well, this experience of unrequited love lent a bit of sour grapes to his future thinking on women and matrimony. For Nietzsche’s professed feelings about marriage would indeed be conflicted; he saw the institution as beneficial for the raising of children, and thus to society as a whole, but also as a potential burden on a man’s personal progress and fulfillment.

But Nietzsche offered similarly dualistic and frequently polemical takes on most other subjects as well. While his approach was to mix irony and seriousness — to provoke thought, rather than offer clear takes — within these intentional obscurifications he nonetheless embedded unarguably sound maxims and timeless truths.

Thus among the philosopher’s writings on marriage, you can find some surprisingly good nuggets of wisdom. Ones that can be used as helpful gauges in deciding whether or not you should consider taking your commitment to the person you’re dating to the next, ultimate, level.

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