
When to stop dating and settle down - tintinnabula
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/16/when-to-stop-dating-and-settle-down-according-to-math/
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l33tbro
"Wait to long and all the good ones might be gone". The older I get, the more
I see what a fallacy this kind of thinking is. A lot of the "good ones" often
exit marriages and long-term relationships to better themselves. On the other
hand, the "good ones" that stay often stop becoming "good ones" and settle. I
found dating to be about concentrating on yourself and your own development,
then things kind of took care of themselves.

~~~
AznHisoka
Funny you say this.. A friend of mine basically is playing the long game with
a few of his huge crushes (who are married). He stays in touch with him,
remembers to send thoughtful emails on their b'day, Christmas hoping they'll
divorce one day. And when they do, the first person they'll jump ship to will
be him. That's his thinking... Although, he's married too currently, so
there's that.

~~~
caseysoftware
That is _messed up_ and if I was the current spouse on either side of that,
there would be a major problem.

Further, divorces are horrible messes, even in the best of circumstances. To
"hope" that for anyone else is even more messed up.

~~~
deciplex
Well, clearly the kind of low self-esteem psychopath who keeps track of past
crushes in the hopes of weaseling his way into an affair/relationship with
women who have already proven they are less likely to make suitable partners
than baseline, doesn't have much regard for what society has deemed "messed
up".

~~~
angmarsbane
Wait, how have the women proven they are less likely to make suitable partners
than baseline?

Are you basing this off the assumption one of those women eventually divorces?
Divorce doesn't necessarily mean someone is an unsuitable partner.

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empath75
The main flaw with this is that relationships aren't an ordered set. I don't
even know how I'd rate my relationships in order. Either a relationship works
or it doesn't. I married the first person I found where our relationship just
never stopped working, even after a few years of living together.

edit: It also ignores the fact that you yourself are going to change as you
date people. Some of the relationships that didn't work out for me, didn't
work out because I was terrible at being in a relationship, and that doesn't
factor into the equation at all. It sort of presumes you're some perfect
relationship oracle.

(which isn't to say that the math isn't interesting, because it is, I just
think anyone that takes the math as an actual model to use in their life is
being silly).

~~~
glibgil
The article addresses the unordered set problem. Did you really read the whole
thing?

"There’s the risk, for example, that the first person you date really is your
perfect partner... If you follow the rule, you’ll reject them anyway. And as
you continue to date other people, no one will ever measure up to your first
love, and you’ll end up rejecting everyone, and end up alone with your cats."

"Another -- probably more realistic -- option is that you start your life with
a string of really terrible boyfriends or girlfriends that give you super low
expectations about the potential suitors out there... The next person you date
is marginally better than the failures you dated in your past, and you end up
marrying him. But he’s still kind of a dud, and doesn't measure up to the
great people you could have met in the future."

"So obviously there are ways this method can go wrong. But it still produces
better results than any other formula you could follow, whether you’re
considering 10 suitors or 100."

~~~
wrsh07
Ordered set meaning you can compare them and come up with a "total ordering."

The point is that relationships can't be boiled down to a single number or
objective metric.

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delazeur
When I was in middle school a family friend (and Microsoft engineer) advised
me to spend my teens and twenties dating as many people as possible and give
every relationship a numerical rating, then settle down with the first person
who exceeded two standard deviations above the average.

The advice was mostly in jest, but I think it says something interesting about
how tech people look at the world.

~~~
fossuser
[Edit] Suppose I should have read the article first since it's basically about
exactly this.

Sounds like he was giving a high level explanation of the 'secretary problem'.

Since an alternate name for it is the marriage problem, I guess it's not too
far off.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem)

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pmcjones
In 1968 I was a freshman at U.C. Berkeley with a part-time job at the Computer
Center. I had dated since high school, but never had a steady girl friend. I
met a young lady who was also a U.C. student and who also worked at the
Computer Center. We found each other quite engaging, were married early in
1970, and are about to celebrate our 46th anniversary. We did not perform a
mathematical analysis, but we felt a mutual attraction, affection, and desire
to share our lives, and we are very glad we acted on it.

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sarciszewski
I'm 26 and I've never even figured out how to _start_ dating. Why are y'all in
such a hurry to stop?

~~~
knicholes
I couldn't recommend Mars and Venus on a Date more highly. I know the sample
size is ridiculously small, but 5 out of 5 people I've given this book to have
gotten married within a year. (These were also people who were looking to find
someone to marry)

~~~
delazeur
It sounds like none of them were with their future spouses when you gave them
the book. I may be cynical, but marrying after less than one to two years of
dating doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

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mikepalmer
Would like to see this adapted to angel investing...

Like the investor wants to invest $1m per year, and will look at n companies
over the year. The investor only has short time to accept/reject any
particular company - s/he can't wait until the end of the year to decide
everything. So what's the rule for accepting/rejecting the ith company?

...and to make it more complicated, what fraction of the $1m should be
invested in the ith company.

...furthermore after 5 years of experience, how much better can the investor
pick. Maybe s/he should not invest the full $1m the first year, etc.

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moron4hire
I firmly believe that the only way the-general-we will get to the point that
we are having better relationships is when we stop worrying about being in a
relationship so much. People have a lot of anxiety over the idea of being
single, and I think this makes people stay in bad relationships longer than
they should. If you don't fear being single, it's easier to wait for The Right
One.

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JoshCole
The math can't really tell you to settle down: it assumes future knowledge as
to the number of people you are going to end up dating. Then in the same
breath it suggests a strategy which will yield a stopping point that is less
than the number of people you guessed you would end up dating.

If there are ten people you will end up dating as your guess as to how many
you should date then apparently you now stop gathering information after
dating about 4 people. Lets say the next person meets the criteria gained
through the first 4 dates. Then this firth person is the stopping point. You
have now dated five people.

So really according to the math you should have actually stopped gathering
criteria at roughly two people. But then you could have settled for the third.

So in that case you would have only needed to date roughly one person to
gather criteria. So now you could have ended up getting matched to the second
person.

And if you were matched to the second person then the criteria would have been
roughly one person.

Basically, the length of the data collection process and the resulting
selection both depend on each other.

~~~
wrsh07
You're thinking about it slightly wrong.

You want to know the number of possible people you might date. These are
"dateable candidates."

If that number is "n", then by the constraints given, you don't want to end up
actually dating each and every one -- if the last one isn't a match, you're
screwed.

We can try to ground this with an example. Suppose you're a female, and you
know that you want to marry someone to conceive a child together. Now,
[suppose] you have until you're ~40 years old to have a kid. Then you need to
find your ideal suitor slightly before that.

So now, if you imagine you'll meet 10 "dateable candidates" per year, and
you're just under 30, then you might estimate n to be 100.

Note, the method doesn't guarantee you'll stop shortly after the 37th dateable
person you meet because it might take much longer until you find someone
better than the first 37.

But at least you know that you've given yourself the best chance at finding
the best person to have a kid with [under the dowry problem restrictions].

~~~
JoshCole
But then we are back to the initial problem: we are just guessing how many
people we are going to date. So its still not really true that the math
supports it when dating in actual reality. There is no reason to choose two,
three, four, or any other number based on math alone.

There are other assumptions that this model of dating makes that also aren't
well founded. For example, the probability distribution of the candidates
probably isn't going to be uniform: a person who has dated one person versus
someone who has dated fifty is going to have a lot of biases to the selection
that the person who dated only one person didn't have at that time.

What I'm getting at here is that this isn't math giving an answer. There are
many different places where a person has to make leaps of faith in order to
accept this model. And a person also probably needs to make a definitively
incorrect guess to start things off.

So if someone were to be wondering if they are being an idiot for not dumping
the person they are with, who they like, for the sake of appeasing this math
model? They could be prudent: and it wouldn't be going with what is supposedly
going to give them a 37% shot at finding their best match. It would be not
breaking up with the person they are dating.

~~~
wrsh07
It's a math problem. You make some assumptions, and then you solve the problem
with respect to those assumptions.

Of course all models of the world are flawed. But some are useful. If you're
wondering which restaurant you should stop at on your walk from a to b but
aren't familiar with the area, you might assume you should pick the next place
better than all previous after walking a third of the way home. That would be
a reasonable application of this model.

Regarding your last point: I wouldn't base serious life decisions exclusively
on an "optimal game theory" move. That would be nuts! This _obviously_ doesn't
perfectly model reality, so why act like it does?

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s0uthPaw88
The limitation I see with applying this method is that you need to know the
total number of potential suitors at the start. How can you accurately
estimate this if you don't have any past experiences to base your estimate on?

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kra34
the Washington Post has really gone down hill since Bezos bought them

~~~
wrong_variable
You must be single :(

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ChuckFrank
37% of what? equal what? did I miss the suggested number? I see that it's
dependent on the number of people that you are considering, from 10 to 100,
but that leaves a difference of between 4 and 40 people to date. How do we
know how many people, total, we would date, when we are just starting?

I get the feeling that this article only has half the math.

As an aside, I've heard that the optimum number for this equation is in fact
12. So 12 is the 38%. But this article doesn't confirm that - as far as I can
tell.

~~~
rhino369
It probably depends on your starting age and how long before you really want
to get married (women have biological restraints and unless you want a large
age difference men do too), and how long you'd date before accurately rating.

12 is probably too high. That would mean you'd date over 30 people. People who
are single their whole life don't seriously date that many people.

The article suggests 11 as the number of suitors (as an assumption, not
conclusion). That's probably fair, maybe even too high.

So you should settle for the best partner (of any previous) after number 4.
That could be 5 but it could also be 6 or 10.

