Because I really couldn't afford a girlfriend, not even a proverbial 'cheap date' like my wife was. Shit I broke out coupons on an early outing. I had NO business even trying to hold a relationship with her because she had her shit together while I was truly a polar opposite of her stability.

The conventionally wise choice at the time, for both of us, was for me to remain single until I figured things out. We actually came pretty close to not working out at all before things finally turned around for me.

You know what sold her on me though? The fact that I was willing to go hold a sign on a corner for 8 hours a weekend, something I had done before and absolutely hated. The first stint had me in tears the first two weekends because at that point I truly believed that that was the sort of life I was destined for. That first stint preceded her, but she knew about it and saw that I was willing to do it again because, well, fuck it, it's SOMETHING in a vast sea of nothing.

The other thing that sold her was my insistence on paying for everything I possibly could, even when it hurt

And that's the heart of my point; Hannah is looking at circumstances, not people.

True story: A close friend of mine, very much a little sister type, called me about a year into my relationship with my wife. She didn't date through high school and in college found herself with two very different guys. She explained both guys and asked for my advice. I picked the guy that appeared to be less of a catch on the surface due to some subtle character elements that stood out in her descriptions of both guys.

Again, true story, they got married a couple years later. On the 5th of this month, my daughter and I attended the 2nd birthday of their daughter, which doubled as a pregnancy announcement and gender reveal party. She gets to be a stay at home mom, which was something she wanted.

Any story can be different if you change certain variables, but any time you view people strictly through the lense of surface circumstances while discarding the intangibles, you do so at the expense of potentially good options.