But speaking of needing to be "a little crazy" to get married, the same goes for natural masculine ambition. A man has to be a little crazy, willing to stand out, willing to excel, be the first, the best -- that takes a certain willingness to turn off his reason but only A) temporarily and B) limited scope or area.
For example when I wrote my games for Android. I wanted to see what I could accomplish. I invested a lot of time, and I did learn a lot. I didn't write the next Angry Birds, but I still have fond memories of that stage of my life. I learned a lot that I use in my career to this day.
An even better example was when I first got married, I wrote an entire Warcraft II clone (that's a CD-ROM DOS game - Real Time Strategy) in the browser! Using primitive Javascript. Basically a master-class at what you could do with Javascript and the browser at the time. It was literally a webpage, that acted like a professional CD-ROM game. Changed mouse cursor, keybindings, everything. And Internet Explorer 6.0 (remember that?) even let you reassign the F5 key! Can you imagine that? It saved your progress to a server. There was a mini-map, and everything. I wish it still worked.
I looked and looked, and couldn't find any other game on the Internet like it. I mean we're talking a browser game, in 2006. What kind of browser games (no install) would let you experience Warcraft II? Mine was with penguins instead of humans/orcs.
But again -- I was motivated, and wanted to learn. I would never have time for that kind of project now, with the size of my family and land. Too many responsibilities. But as a single or newlywed -- yeah! Men need to be willing to take risks and tackle huge challenges and projects.
And let's not forget the wild project of a city boy moving to the country! I had never owned land before *or even lived in a rural setting before* when I bought this place. I had to learn EVERYTHING about living and working in the country. Of course I have zero regrets on this heading and I wouldn't have it any other way -- but I'll readily admit that if I hadn't been a bit crazy, I would never have done it. Especially since we bought this place before we sold our first house.
The same goes for having a large family. My wife had 2 brothers. I had 2 sisters (and when I was 14, my parents gave me a brother). So both of us were from average/small families. But we embarked on the "adventure" of Big Family life. And homeschooling life for that matter. My mom started homeschooling when I was a Junior in HS. Wife and her siblings all went to public school too. So we got almost comfortable with launching out into the deep, into uncharted territory, with only pre-Vatican II books and some older parishioners as our guide. Parents really weren't any help; they were typical Boomers. (3 formula-fed, vaxxed kids, sent to public school, live in the city, in a house with a 30 year mortgage, etc.)
Or starting any business. It takes a certain risk appetite, a certain "healthy large self esteem", to pour yourself into a business that you think will succeed that others failed at, or no one else (but you) thought of!
As I so often jokingly say, "You only live once, and I'm gonna prove it!"