There aren’t many things you can attempt in this world where “succeeding” requires you to be dead at the end of it.

Suicide, of course, is the obvious one. What else? Well, a kamikaze attack, I guess, but that’s a subcategory of suicide. Having a dozen generations of descendants, maybe? No, because theoretically, if you could somehow live long enough to see a dozen generations of your descendants get born, that wouldn’t automatically mean you failed at it. “Get into heaven?” Sorta, I suppose. Except that if heaven actually exists, then death isn’t even real, it’s just shedding a body so that the Real You can go on living somewhere else. Heaven kinda requires that nobody who goes there is dead.

No… I think the only other endeavor that really fits in that category is “marriage.”

According to the normal understanding of success (with all the usual dismal trappings of my opinions on “normality,” of course)… if your marriage ends, and the two of you are still alive, then fuck you, you both failed.

Marriage and suicide. The two activities in this world where survival and success are incompatible.

…But. I guess that’s only if you think of marriage as a cooperative joint effort. And think of the failure condition as both of you surviving.

You can (still according to fucked-up Normal Definitions) have a successful, non-failed marriage if your spouse died and you are still alive.

In this understanding of things… marriage then must be defined as a type of duel-to-the-death.

No fucking wonder normal people have the shittiest relationship with marriage imaginable.