2015_02_17 Taking Risks in Love

Taking Risks in Love

By ARTHUR C. BROOKS February 17, 2015

想问你敢不敢，像我这样为爱痴狂

阿瑟·C·布鲁克斯2015年02月17日

SHE was 25. I was 24. We spent only a couple of days together and shared no language in common. But when I returned to the United States from that European music festival, I announced to my parents that I had met my future wife.

那时，她25岁，我24岁。我们只相处了几天时间，而且语言不通。不过，在我从那个欧洲音乐节回到美国之后，我向父母宣布，自己遇到了未来的妻子。

Of course, I had to convince Ester first. So I tackled the project as if it were a start-up. I began by studyin g Spanish. Before long, I’d quit my job and moved to her native Barcelona — where I knew no one except her — in hot pursuit. The market pressure was intense: Men would shout wedding proposals to her from moving cars. But I pressed on, undeterred. It took two years to close the deal, but she finally said yes, and we married.

当然了，我得先说服埃斯特尔(Ester)本人。于是，我对待这件事的态度就好像正在创办一家公司。我开始学习西班牙语，不久以后，辞掉了工作，搬到了她的家乡巴塞罗那——在那里，我只认识她一个人——对她展开了狂热的追求。市场竞争相当激烈：一些男子会从路过的车子里向她喊出求婚的话语。但我勇往直前，毫不气馁。我花了两年时间才大功告成，她终于同意了，我们结了婚。

Today, I have many colleagues in their 20s. When I tell them this story, they shake their heads in disbelief. “That’s crazy,” one told me. “No one would do that today.” The first point is fair: It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been called nuts. But it didn’t see m so crazy at the time, and plenty of people who, like me, were born in the 1960s, have similar stories. This left me wondering: Are people today less romantically adventurous?

现在，我身边有许多20多岁的同事。当我把这个故事讲给他们听时，他们都摇头，表示难以置信。“那也太疯狂了，”有人说。“现在没人会那么做。”第一个观点没错：这也不是第一次有人叫我疯子。但这件事在当时并没有显得那么疯狂，很多像我一样出生在上世纪60年代的人都有类似的经历。这让我开始思考：是不是今天的人不那么愿意为爱情冒险了？

I went looking for an answer in the data on love and marriage. First and most obviously, marriage rates have plummeted in recent years. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1960, 10 percent of men and 8 percent of women over 25 were unmarried. By 2012, those numbers climbed to 23 percent and 17 percent. This is because of fewer first marriages, not rising divorce; the latter has been falling for three decades.

我开始在关于爱情和婚姻的数据中寻找答案。最引人注目的数据是，近些年的结婚比例大幅下降。根据皮尤研究中心(Pew Research Center)的数据，1960年，在25岁以上的人群中，10%的男性和8%的女性处在没有婚姻的状态。到了2012年，这两个数字分别攀升为23%和17%。这是因为初次步入婚姻的人变少了，而不是因为离婚人数增多了。过去30年里，美国的离

婚率一直在下滑。

You might retort that people are simply marrying later, and that these figures fail to account for cohabitation and same-sex relationships. But marriage has declined in every age cohort, and according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan, the percentage of households headed by a married or cohabiting couple has fallen to 52 percent from 58 percent since 1981. In a decade or less, we could expect that most American adults will live without a romantic partner.

你可能会反驳，人们只不过是推迟了结婚的年龄，而且这些数据没有包括同居和同性伴侣关系。不过，各个年龄层的已婚比例都在走低，根据密歇根大学的国民收支动态长期追踪调查(Panel Study of Income Dynamics)，由一对结婚或同居伴侣组成的家庭比例，从1981年的58%下降到了52%。我们可以预计，在至多十年的时间里，多数美国成年人的生活当中都会缺少爱侣的陪伴。

Should we even care? Sociologists can speculate about whether marriage is outmoded, but the answer to that question is apparently obvious to those without partners. In a 2013 Gallup poll, 81 percent of people who had never married said they want to marry.

我们应该感到忧虑吗？社会学家可能会思考婚姻是不是已经过时了，但对于没有伴侣的人来说，这个问题的答案似乎十分明显。在2013年的盖洛普(Gallup)调查中，从未结婚的人士中，81%表示自己想结婚。

What can turn these trends around? The conventional response is to decrease the risk and hassle of coupling through new apps that connect friends of friends or algorithms for matching strangers as perfectly as possible. But making mating less frightening and inconvenient should not be our priority. What we really need is more romantic entrepreneurship. And that requires cultivating two core entrepreneurial qualities: courage and mindfulness.

怎样才能扭转这些趋势呢？传统的解决办法是，通过那些帮人牵线搭桥的新应用程序，或是把陌生人完美匹配起来的算法，来减少找对象的风险和麻烦。不过，我们的首要任务不应该是让寻找配偶变得不那么恐怖和麻烦。我们真正需要的是在爱情中增添更多的创业精神。这就要培养两个核心的创业品质：勇气和专注。

First comes courage.

首先是勇气。

The most distinguishing characteristic of entrepreneurs is their willingness and ability to take a personal risk for the chance at explosive rewards. This is not the norm. Most people are slaves to fear, and prefer avoiding risk to staring it down. As the author Aaron C. Brown writes in “The Poker Face of Wall Street,” most people wander through life “never consciously accepting extra risk to pick up the money and other good things lying around them.”