Anti-Climacus

BUT: to actually try and answer the question seriously:

like the people Diotima quotes, I have my own little informal list of personal qualities I'm looking for, which intentionally rangge from the sublime to the ridiculous, and always run something like the following:

1. Conversational ability
2. Intelligence (broadly defined)
3. Attractiveness (let's not kid ourselves, people)
4. Emotional maturity
5. Career-mindedness (that is, looking for something besides the MRS degree)
6. Must like or be able to pretend to like "Hotter Than Mojave in My Heart" by Iris DeMent
7. Must be okay with the fact that virtually all my friends are women

and, of course, there are the two big ones that function as deal-breakers, but are generally unspoken: religion and politics; for talking about marriage specifically, I'd add on having a church wedding and having children (at some point).

But to return to SB's question, as to whether the sort-of-accidental way people decide they want to marry each other is an acceptible system, I think it's reasonable to say, with Kierkegaard (albeit in a different context), that any list of things is really just "quantitative steps to a qualitative leap." That is, it strikes me as entirely possible that someone who fufills all of these requirements is someone I'd have no interest in marrying, and that someone who didn't really meet the requirements here. Ultimately, filling out the list isn't enough--there has to be something more. So I feel that it's probably just a fact structurally built into any attempt to say how people ought to choose a marriage partner that it's bound to fall short of complete explanatory power.

This is just what I think, anyway... let me know what you think.