it's precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the…
Page 68 keyword marriage it's precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else - someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner who could ever say - that makes a marriage meaningful. The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the joy of missing out by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the fear of missing out. it is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn't even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn't have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn't truly mean anything. In this state of mind you can embrace the fact that you're foregoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you've decided to do instead dash earn money to support your family or write your novel or pause on a hiking trail is how you've chosen to spend the portion of time that you never had any right to expect .
— from Family & Parenting (Family/Parenting)
In the book
It is no accident that when people sense their time is short, their priorities collapse inward to one thing — emotional closeness, time with the people they love. And choosing this family — these particular people, over every other life you might have lived — is not a limitation on your freedom; it is the very thing that makes your life mean something. I will tell you where my own dreams have landed, now that I am old. — Family & Parenting (Family/Parenting)