The one critical question Nietzsche said you should ask before getting married

The one critical question Nietzsche said you should ask before getting married

It can change everything.

Sean Kernan

Oct 21, 2026

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Initially, I didn’t quite know what she saw in Jake.

I mean, he was a nice guy, but there was a clear lacking between them. She was an upwardly mobile lawyer with so many thoughts and so much intellectual energy.

And Jake was, well, a simple kind of guy. Which is fine too. But he didn’t seem to be in sync with her at our dinner parties or really relate to her on so many levels. He was nice enough and a happy drunk at that.

I’ll even give him credit: he wasn’t threatened by dating a beautiful woman who was clearly much more intelligent than he was. Yet you have to wonder how viable these types of relationships really are.

John Milton, famed poet and author of Paradise Lost, faced a similar predicament in 1642. He married Mary Powell, and fairly quickly, their union fell apart.

He turned this crisis into a theory, publishing

The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce

. Among many bold claims, one of them was that marriage should be dissolvable if the two are not intellectually compatible. Needless to say, this theory was not well received by the public. During this time, divorce in England was inconceivably difficult to attain, and reserved only for the most extreme circumstances.

Milton had a key point in his argument that this intellectual gap led to a very specific kind of loneliness that was both suffocating and isolating at the same time. In his thesis, he argued that a core purpose of marriage was for two people to meet and have conversation. Even further, a man in a relationship where this connection and conversation could not meaningfully exist could find himself lonelier than he was as a bachelor.

And in this argument, Milton invoked a firestorm.

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