Warren Buffett, one of history's most successful investors, put it bluntly: "The biggest decision of your life will be who you choose to marry."¹ He emphasized this during a conversation with Bill Gates at Columbia University: "You want to associate with people who are the kind of person you'd like to be. You'll move in that direction. And the most important person by far in that respect is your spouse. I can't overemphasize how important that is."¹
This isn't romantic sentimentality—it's strategic clarity from someone who understands compounding better than almost anyone alive.
Consider George the Poet—the British-Ugandan spoken-word artist and his wife Sandra who serves as Head of Operations at his company.² They've known each other since school, got married in 2021, and now have two children together. George describes their partnership this way: "I bring the strategy. She brings the structure. My vision is forward gazing, but Sandra... [watches] my back."²
Here's someone who won a Peabody Award—one of the world's most prestigious media prizes—while building a business partnership with his wife. The relationship works because Sandra isn't just theoretically supporting George's career; she's integral to making it function. She provides the operational excellence that allows his creative vision to flourish.
Or consider Oprah Winfrey and Stedman Graham—together for nearly four decades in what she calls a "spiritual partnership."³ They never married, never had children, never followed the traditional script. Yet their relationship has endured precisely because it was designed for their ambitions and realities, not society's expectations. As Oprah explained: "I realized I didn't actually want a marriage. I wanted to be asked. I wanted to know he felt I was worthy of being his missus, but I didn't want the sacrifices, the compromises, the day-in-day-out commitment required to make a marriage work. My life with the show was my priority, and we both knew it."³
The lesson? Partnership compounds when it's built on alignment—of values, trajectory, and mutual support—not on checking boxes or following convention.
Whether it's George building his creative empire alongside Sandra, or Oprah maintaining her media dominance with Stedman's support, successful people understand that who you choose to build a life with is the single highest-leverage decision you'll make, and it deserves the same strategic thinking you'd bring to any other transformative choice.
What High Achievers Understand About Marriage
Here's what the data reveals: marriage rates have held steady or increased among high earners and those with advanced degrees. Meanwhile, they've declined 15+ percentage points among lower-income groups.⁴
Successful people are more likely to get married and stay married, not because they're luckier, but because they understand something fundamental about how value compounds over time. High-achieving individuals view marriage as a strategic advantage, not a romantic luxury.
Research using detailed administrative data from Denmark found that couples have become increasingly likely to self-select into marriages with partners in the same "ambition category"—defined by starting wages and wage-growth trajectories. This trend can explain more than 40 percent of increasing inequality since 1980.⁵ High-achieving individuals are pairing with other high-achievers, creating what researchers call "power couples" whose combined resources and influence compound exponentially.
Married people earn on average 26 percent more income and hold 35 percent more net worth than singles.⁶ Selection into marriage based on productive characteristics, effective economic benefits for married couples, and stronger motivations to build wealth all contribute to this advantage.
Research by Brittany C. Solomon and Joshua J. Jackson of Washington University showed that having a conscientious spouse can boost your salary significantly. With every one-standard-deviation increase in a spouse's conscientiousness, an individual is likely to earn approximately $4,000 more per year.⁷
The wealthy understand that partnership amplifies strengths, provides stability during risk-taking, and creates shared momentum that no individual can generate alone. They see marriage as the ultimate strategic partnership—and they approach finding that partner accordingly.
The Competitive Advantage of the Right Partnership
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger understood this in their 60-year business partnership that created a $630 billion investment empire.⁸ When asked what mattered most about their success, they didn't point to their investment strategy. Buffett said the real prize was "the luxury of associating with people we like," adding "that beats 25-room houses, or six cars."⁸
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield—friends since middle school—turned $5 and a correspondence course into a $326 million ice-cream business.⁹ Cohen brought creative vision and social consciousness; Greenfield contributed scientific precision and operational skills.⁹ Their complementary personalities created not just a business, but a brand that balanced profits with purpose.
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis bonded over their shared love of Norse mythology and literature as Oxford professors in the late 1920s.¹⁰ They formed The Inklings—an informal literary group that met Thursday evenings in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College to read work-in-progress aloud and offer rigorous critique.¹⁰ Lewis wrote, "What I owe to them all is incalculable,"¹⁰ while Tolkien acknowledged: "The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not 'influence' as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my 'stuff' could be more than a private hobby."¹⁰ Without Lewis's encouragement, The Lord of the Rings might never have been completed. Without Tolkien's influence, Lewis might never have returned to Christianity.¹⁰
High-achieving individuals understand that the right partnerships are built on alignment—of values, trajectory, and ambition. Not settling for convenience or appearances, but finding people whose direction amplifies rather than compromises your own.
The wrong partner, or the endless search for one, becomes a drain on your most valuable resources: time, energy, and focus.
The App Trap: Built for Consumption, Not Connection
Meanwhile, the rest of the population has been handed a poisoned chalice: dating apps that promise connection but are engineered for the opposite.
These apps have created a rigged system that profits from loneliness while leaving millions of people feeling more disconnected than ever. The "swipe" reduces human beings to yes-or-no decisions based on split-second judgments. Users swipe through people like they scroll through memes, conditioned to see potential partners not as complex individuals but as disposable commodities.
Research shows that frequent dating app use is related to undesired psychological outcomes.
Excessive swiping was linked to upward social comparison, fear of being single, and partner choice overload.¹¹
A cross-sectional study of 437 participants found that being a dating app user was significantly associated with having psychological distress and depression. When analyzed together, app users had significantly higher mean scores for distress, anxiety, and depression compared to non-users.¹²
This isn't an accidental design failure, it's the business model. Dating apps don't make money when you find someone and delete the app. They make money when they keep you swiping, stuck in an endless loop of shallow judgments and manufactured hope.
They've gamified human connection, turning what should be a careful process of finding a life partner into something that feels like scrolling through a shopping catalog.
The Cost of Disposability
The culture these apps create has reshaped how people treat one another. Ghosting has become an epidemic. Why bother with honesty or closure when there's always another profile waiting? The apps normalize avoidance, dishonesty, and disrespect, leaving users anxious, self-doubting, and mistrustful.
But here's what gets lost in the swipe: the truly important questions about partnership.
Who will stand with you in the trenches before the victories, in the uncertain territories you want to conquer, rather than collapsing into tradition and what has already been done?
Who would you trust to be by your side in a moment of real crisis, when the highlight reel stops and life gets messy?
Who would you be genuinely inspired to brainstorm with on a new business idea, excited by their perspective and trusting in their discretion?
Who would you take a once-in-a-lifetime trip with, knowing that you'll actually create memories and enjoy their company, not waste the time documenting for an imaginary audience?
Who will be there for the long run—not just the victories and celebrations, but the quiet moments, the tedious Tuesdays, the mundane responsibilities that make up most of life?
Dating apps don't ask these questions. They can't. Their entire model depends on treating depth as an inconvenience, on keeping you convinced that the next swipe might be better than taking the time to truly know the person in front of you.
The apps have convinced a generation that connection should feel effortless, that if you have to work at it, the person must be wrong. But anyone in a lasting partnership knows the truth: depth requires effort. Compatibility requires understanding.
Adopting the Strategic Approach to Partnership
The good news? The marriage divide isn't inevitable. The strategies successful people use to form lasting partnerships are learnable and replicable. It's not about wealth—it's about approach.
High achievers treat finding a life partner the same way they treat every other important decision:
They invest resources proportional to the stakes. Just as they hire executive recruiters to find their COO, wealth managers for their portfolio, and real estate agents for their home, they understand that finding a life partner deserves dedicated expertise and attention.
They prioritize depth over breadth. They know that more options don't lead to better decisions—careful evaluation does. They'd rather meet five highly compatible people than swipe through five hundred profiles.
They understand that speed kills quality. The apps have trained us to make split-second judgments, but lasting compatibility reveals itself slowly, through thoughtful conversation and shared experiences.
They ask the questions that matter. Not "Do they look good in photos?" but "Will they challenge me to grow? Can I trust them in moments of vulnerability? Do our visions for life align?"
This isn't about having more money to throw at the problem. It's about bringing the same intentionality, rigor, and patience to choosing a life partner that you'd bring to any other high-stakes decision.
The Depth-First Alternative
This is why we're building care/of differently.
We start with depth because we understand what Buffett, Lewis, and Winfrey understood: choosing a partner, in life or business, isn't about finding someone attractive enough to impress your friends or successful enough to check the boxes. It's about finding someone whose trajectory aligns with yours, whose values resonate with yours, whose presence in your life makes you more of who you want to become.
It's about building a life with someone who amplifies your strengths, who challenges you to grow, who provides stability when you need it and adventure when you're ready for it. It's about connections that last—not through the honeymoon phase, but through the decades of working on something meaningful together.
That requires asking different questions—the kind that take time to answer thoughtfully, that reveal character, vision and compatibility at a level no photo or bio ever could.
The care/of method is built on top of these questions. Questions adapted from frameworks that have endured for over a century because they cut through performance to reveal truth.
Building Partnerships That Compound
At the end of your life, you won't remember how many matches you got or how many likes your photos received. You'll remember the person who stood beside you through it all—or you'll regret that you never found them because you were too busy swiping to look up.
The opportunity is right in front of you: to adopt the same strategic approach to partnership that successful people have always used. To ask deeper questions. To put in the necessary work. To be patient and selective rather than desperate and scattered.
Because in a world of disposable connections, depth is your competitive advantage. In a culture of endless options, commitment is rare and valuable. In an age of highlight reels, showing up for the mundane moments is what actually builds lasting partnership.
This is how you turn the single most important decision of your life into the investment that compounds more than any other: choosing someone not just for who they are today but for who they're becoming, and making the commitment to grow together rather than grow apart.
