Do I?

When pitched at 100mph, it will take a baseball just under 400ms to reach home base. Swinging the bat takes a professional batter around 150ms, while processing the pitch – was it a fastball? a slider? a curveball? at what angle is it going? – will take somewhere between 75 and 100ms. This leaves 150ms, give or take, to decide what to do. Swing? Or let it go? Is it going to fly within the strike zone? The stakes are high and you need to be quick in making your decision, else you'll lose the game.

You're not exactly batting here, but you feel like your reaction needs to be almost as lightning quick or you'll find yourself leaving the home plate with the bat between your legs. It isn't a baseball that's coming at you, but a question. Only now is the last of its words being pronounced, but two words into it you already knew what was coming, like a batter identifying the pitch, and your brain went into overdrive to decide what course of action to take. You'd considered this scenario many times in the past and believed it would be quite a straightforward decision to make, that you would feel deep inside of you whether I do were the words that should leave your lips. The stakes are high and you need to be assertive when you give an answer.

And it's off! As the question mark hangs in the air, you find yourself doing what you always do when making important decisions like this one: balancing the cons and pros.

First and foremost, of course, is happiness, satisfaction, mental well-being or whatever other incarnation it may have. Will an affirmative reply bring these things to you? Because if there's one thing you've learned about yourself over the years it's that you value happiness – your own happiness, mind you – over many other things in this world, so it has become almost imperative that everything that you do, every decision that you make or promise that you break is in the pursuit of it.

Visiting your parents for a long weekend, a midnight stroll on a hot summer night, getting together with your friends for a meal – it turns out that the abundance of food and the joyous banter are the key items in this one, not haute cuisine and intellectual discussions, you've figured out –, reading a book out in the park under the sun, riding your bike in the woods as the sun is coming out, waking up late on a Saturday morning, watching a movie cuddled up together. These are some of the things that you know make you happy.

Ignoring the snarky comments directed at you, feeling hungry after a meal in order to not gain any more weight, being glad for your best friend's promotion at work – even when you did get shafted in the process –, putting in endless hours into a project that everyone – but you more than anyone – has been working on for ages just to get it out the door, just one second-last push. These are some of the things you thought made you happy, but in fact made you numb to your own emotions.

So, which one is it? What will saying I do lead to?

Before you can decide, though, you become aware of the silence around you. The question mark is long past and you haven't said anything yet. You still have time, but you cannot linger any longer on happiness and must move onto the next item in your mental pros and cons list.

Does this make financial sense? Yes, yes, the decision you're making should be more visceral than that, not something that money should decide, but you cannot pretend to be someone other than the practical person you are, so this aspect simply cannot be ignored. It's not that this will be the deciding factor, nothing like that, but it would be silly to ignore it. Of course, it isn't the short-term impact on your finances this kind of thing has that worries you, no. The answer to that is obvious and not worth lingering on. No, it's the longer-term ripple effect this can have, if any, and whether it will be an overall positive or negative one. After all, you're going to be paying tuition fees for the next three years (four tops, you hope) while only on a part-time job, so you cannot take this matter lightly.

Once again, before you manage to decide in which direction the gold scales are being tipped, the issue of the clock ticking comes to the forefront and you feel compelled to run onto the next item of the day in this toughest of mental games you have drawn yourself into (because you know you're partly to blame, you aren't in this exact spot where this question becomes almost inevitable by chance).

Your inner eye descends the mental list you are going through and stops on the next point of consideration: physical health. You've gone through the possible repercussions on your mental well-being, but the state of your body is also an important one to you, one that can very easily be disrupted if you do not watch out for yourself once you accept. In fact, it is the main consequence of saying I do in the public conscience, something you have seen with your own eyes in both Dana and Larry: two years after their own I do, Dana is walking the dog from the comfort of her car (driving the dog might be more accurate, although it's only her in the vehicle while the poor creature tries to find a good spot on which to mark its territory) and Larry's breathing is louder than one of those pugs that sound like they might collapse any minute now.

Well, that one was an easy one, not much to ponder on, but you're glad you considered it. You rush onto the next point, all the while feeling the awkwardness of the echoing silence breathing down your neck, emphasising how much this should not be such a difficult decision.

So. Stress. Ah, yes, your old friend. Some would have included it under mental health, others under physical, but you like to stretch it out along the whole spectrum, like a carpet being unrolled in the middle of a musical number, where it can take up as much space as possible while squeezing you into your own little discomfort zone. Will saying I do bring stress into your life? Isn't it joy that it brings, is that not why one says the words in the first place? Of course it is, and you've seen it bring joy to some – Dana and Larry among them –, but you've also seen it bring stress to those same people. What might seem like a bump in the road to a few becomes a snowed-in mountain pass to many and you have the feeling you might be going in with shorts and a t-shirt where full-on arctic clothing is required.

The hush is becoming unbearable as you tick stress off the list of considerations and realise suddenly that you've reached the end. You cannot think of anything else that needs reflecting on before making a decision and, based on your internal deliberations, it seems obvious to you that saying I do makes no sense at all. The only things that might be in favour of it – and that might is in italics in your head – seem to be grossly outweighed by those against... and yet... Why, why do you feel an impulse to say I do regardless? Why is it tugging at you in a way you cannot resist? After all, so many people before you have said it, and not all of them have come out the other end in bad shape, have they? Surely you're not the only rational person who has had to consider these two simple yet incredibly important words, surely not all of those out there who uttered them were complete irrationals who let their gut feelings take over their brain as easily as that. But then the facts are right there, you've gone through them, you cannot picture yourself going ahead with it anyway...

As your mind finds itself traversing this Escheresque mental environment of yours, the question flies by you well within the strike zone and your bat seems to have somehow gotten caught on the home plate, something that simply should not have happened. The catcher, in the form of social convention, easily stops the ball behind you with its mitt and sends it back to the middle of the diamond, from which it now has to be pitched once more.

The question is repeated exactly as you heard it the first time around, the same enthusiasm and desire to please as it had before.

"Do you want to make that super-sized?"