he was a penecostal fundie, and they where engaged to be married, was looking for houses to buy, but then he got cold feet because he had to "go find himself"
there's no flexibility in that kind of patriarchal role, it's just "here now you sit in a cage and be a Serious Man At All Times for 18+ years"
realized that a function of one argument doesn't need to marshal it's arguments and in the case of a non-escaping symbol argument can just operate directly on the bound register, a simple but powerful optimization