"We visit their families.  We look at their photos, we meet their college friends.  All this contributes to a sense that we've done our homework.  We haven't.  Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating."
-Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person by Alain de Botton