There is an obvious, perhaps even trite, argument against getting married that deserves our attention. Reduced to a crude sketch, the argument is simply that, (a) most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with something like horror or at least great antipathy; (b) the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence (c) when we marry we are putting ourselves in the position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable, and this is a mistake. Few people married or contemplating marriage take this, the Bochelofs Argument, very seriously. That may be because, like Hume, we prudently tend to leave our philosophy behind when we emerge from our study to confront the severe facts of everyday life. VVe may have little patience with a philosophical attack on an institution as deeply ingrained in most people’s day-to-day lives as marriage. However, I propose to take a closer look at the Bachelor’s Argument to see whether it can be taken seriously from a purely theoretical point of view. I will not discuss the further question of whether, if that should turn out to be so, it would be wise to apply our philosophy to everyday life in this case. Let us first try to bring the Argument itself into a somewhat tighter focus and to clear away certain lesser objections. The first premise states that we don’t wish to find ourselves in a loveless marriage; the feelings involved in love are the basis for any desirable marriage. Perhaps we should make the obvious explicit and note that neither this claim nor the argument as a whole will apply to marriages undertaken as a form of economic exchange, as a means of diplomacy, and so on. In these cases the feelings the two persons have for one another are beside the point. But I take it that for most of us (in the contemporary West) this is not so; though there may be many reasons marriage is desirable unrelated to our feelings for the other person—e.g...