On the Actuarial Value of Cold Feet: A Nuptial Life Table Indexed by Plantar Temperature at the Moment of Consent

A person about to make a promise they cannot take back gets cold feet. The feet are genuinely cold, the coldness can be measured at the altar, and what it measures is how long the marriage will last. The sole is one of the few surfaces the body uses to shed heat on demand, and it withdraws its blood within seconds of any call for resolve; the phrase is a description, and English has forgotten that it was ever technical. We instrumented 12,417 ceremonies with a logging thermistor insole, taking as the exposure not temperature — which is largely a thermometer for the room — but thermal reserve: the departure from what that person’s foot should hold, at that ambient, in those shoes, calibrated the week before. The wedding rehearsal supplies a control that no laboratory could build — the same church, the same shoes, the same audience, the same words, and no legal effect — and the rehearsal does not cool the foot. The ceremony cools it by $2.6{}^{\circ }\mathrm{C}$. Across twenty-nine years of register linkage each degree of deficit multiplies the dissolution hazard by $1.61$ (95% CI $1.57$–$1.65$), and forty-one covariates a demographer would ask for add nothing once the foot is known; they predict the foot instead. We give the nuptial life table and the expectation of marriage at every reserve. We recommend that the thermometer be read before the register is signed.