The Checklist I Burned to Find My Wife

I had a list. Estonian. Debt-free. Family not certifiably insane. Grit, faith, an athlete with a strong mindset. I carried that list around for the better part of a decade, like a man carrying a treasure map to a mountain that didn't exist. Then I fell in love with a girl from Long Island who checked half of it, and I've never been so grateful to be wrong. That's the whole essay, really. Everything else … how I got there. … Lifestyle design, the business of doing the big things right so the small things fall in line behind them, has a foundational decision most people never put on the list: who you marry. I read once, in a book about the longest-lived people on earth, that this single choice compounds everything after it. Get it wrong, and you spend the rest of your life paying it down. Get it right, and the interest just keeps rolling in. I'm no expert on love, or on women, or frankly on much of anything. But I did enough of the big things right that I ended up married to my best…