
Optimizing Your Wife - nishantmodak
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath018/kmath018.htm
======
markbnine
The title is off. This is a wife-selection algorithm. If anybody has real
ideas for optimizing a wife, please post.

Also, if you do apply this method, don't tell your perspective wife. She will
drop you like a rock.

~~~
Dove
The quality of your wife is 40% who you are, 20% who you choose, and 80% how
you conduct yourself during courtship and marriage. Overlap due to some
correlations and the fact that it's easier to screw things up than get things
right.

To pre-optimize a future wife, focus on being a man of character. Sacrifice
for noble goals, exercise self-discipline, show love to family, especially
your mother. To optimize an existing wife, continue to do those things, and
also spend a lot of time together, be romantic, communicate honestly and
frequently (pursue intimacy; resolve to hold no secrets), and ensure a good
sex life _for her_ \--which for you means generosity and an eye toward
emotion.

~~~
lionhearted
> The quality of your wife is 40% who you are, 20% who you choose, and 80% how
> you conduct yourself during courtship and marriage.

This is incredibly idealistic - and doesn't really jive with the real world.
It says if a man is a good man and conducts himself exceptionally during
courtship and marriage, his wife is almost certain to be quality.

And this is false! I mean, there's so many real world examples - some people
are undisciplined, unambitious, self-centered, reckless, not grounded, etc,
etc. Unfortunately, I know a couple guys, good guys overall, who married such
women. No matter how much he toils in the marriage, it can't and won't be a
good marriage.

The character and quality of your spouse has a lot to do with their character
- you can help them grow to some extent, but you need to start from a good
place. The idea that "be a good person and conduct yourself well and things
will work out" sounds nice, but is in fact dangerous and bad advice. For both
men and women, the base character of your spouse matters _a lot_ \- and that's
before even starting to look at compatibility and having complimentary views.
Idealism - "be a good man and things will work out" - sounds nice, but it's
the sort of thing you need to be careful with.

~~~
Dove
Fair. Of course, the whole thing is a simplistic rhetorical device; real life
is complicated.

If you really could expect full marks in "be a man of character" and "treat
her right" categories -- if you were some mythical combination of Martin
Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus Christ, perhaps you _could_ redeem a
fairly self-centered wife. Those are, after all, men who made their names by
succeeding at redeeming evil cultures with little more than compassion and
force of character. But it'd sure be difficult and painful. I'm not claiming
things would "work out" easily even in the best case, and that's the worst
one. Most folks really can't expect straight A's there. Most folks, if they're
honest with themselves, are shooting for more like a C+ and maybe don't even
always get there. So in a way, how my model handles that corner case is
academic.

My point by assigning such a low value to who you choose isn't that it doesn't
matter at all -- of course it does. Of course you can easily doom the whole
thing to failure (short of heroic measures) by marrying an utterly
irredeemable jerk. My point is that it's not a relatively big contributer. And
I'm strongly of the opinion that it isn't. Stick to quality women, or even
just decent women, and the other factors dominate.

Over ten, fifteen, twenty years of marriage, the single largest factor in who
your wife is, is who you are. And vice versa. Her criticisms become your
defensive sore spots. Your generocity becomes her avid interest. Your
callousness becomes her indifference. Her complacency becomes your
disinterest. And on and on. After many years, every groove in your soul
matches a cusp in hers, and vice versa. There's feedback. There's resonance.
That's why the quality of your wife is _120% you_.

You grow to be like who you hang out with. You rise to high expectations or
sink to low ones.

Do you want your wife to be beautiful at 35? It doesn't matter whether she was
a 6 or 10 or 8 at 24 when you married her. It matters whether you've been
buying her jewelry, telling her her beauty is worth sacrifice and expense to
you. It matters whether you've been telling her she's beautiful, encouraging
her to experiment with new shoes, or making fun of her when you find her with
green goop all over her face. It matters whether you criticize or support,
because her outward appearance is a measure of her self-esteem, her
confidence, and whether she thinks being pretty is a hobby worth keeping up
with.

Do you want a sexually engaged wife? Make sex something she loves. Be
generous. Be romantic. Be attentive. And wait five years.

Do you want a kind and generous wife? Be kind and generous. Do you want a wife
who understands you? Talk to her. Do you want a wife who is not annoyed with
you all the time? Listen to her criticism, don't defend yourself, change your
behavior, explain in tenderest and most loving tones what has been
misunderstood.

To optimize your wife, optimize yourself. Because marriage is really long, and
after just a few years, she's mostly who you've made her.

(Goes the other way, too. But this place is mostly guys).

~~~
mtw
Sometimes it's difficult to know if the person is "quality", especially
character. You could live with a person and know their worst habits and dark
secrets after only a couple of years.

I find both of you to be lucky (well you pushed also your luck by being hard-
working). It's refreshing though to read this; lots of food for thought,
thanks.

------
weeksie
Funny, but the reason my relationships have gotten better over time has just
as much to do with how much I've grown as it does with my partners.

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aliston
I take issue with this step:

"Thus, as k increases, the left side approaches 1, and we can take the
exponential of both sides to give..."

k/k-1 -> 1 in the limit.

The problem is that most people don't have an infinite number of women to
choose from, so k/k-1 is likely NOT sufficiently close to 1. The algorithm
then takes the exponential of both sides, making the matter worse...

So, based on the average number of serious girlfriends the average person
seems to have before getting married (~4), the average person probably
shouldn't pass on the first N / e... they should probably pass on something
more like the first N / (e^1.3) or so.

------
Pistos2
(I would have sent this in private, but found no contact info in the
respective HN profiles.)

To Dove and lotharbot:

Thanks so much for your comments in this thread. They are extremely
insightful, and resonate strongly with my own experiences of married life,
which is nearing a decade in length. I always admire and am inspired when I
see examples of good marriages.

<insert politically correct well-wishing here>

~~~
lotharbot
Thank you.

------
ckopec
Doesn't this problem basically take the Feynman restaurant problem and
replaces meal with woman?

[http://www.feynmanlectures.info/exercises/Feynmans_restauran...](http://www.feynmanlectures.info/exercises/Feynmans_restaurant_problem.html)

~~~
secretasiandan
I believe this problem is a lot closer to the Secretary Problem
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem> As he notes however, he does
not try to choose "the very best candidate", for which the optimal solution is
to pass on the first 1/e candidates. Instead, he tries to maximize the
"goodness" of his wife selection.

In short : maximum likelihood soultion is to pass on (1/e)*N, minimum mean
squared error solution is to pass on sqrt(N). This of course assumes you can
estimate N well.

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SlyShy
Could this be applicable to search ranking? Say I was doing a search based on
an input string, and I had a "closeness of match" heuristic. That expected
value for N=100 case seemed so good that I'm considering the possibility that
you only partially search any data set and return a result that is pretty much
good enough. (At least initially, and then you could asynchronously add better
results to the list, in the background. Then you'd get very fast first
results, at the very least).

------
jqueryin
This is all well and good, but doesn't take into account that your ideal wife
won't want YOU.

~~~
iacvlvs
"Will want me" is a necessary criterion for my ideal wife!

~~~
MrHyde
"Necessary existence" is a property of my ideal wife. Step one of the proof
complete.

~~~
philwelch
I can conceive of my ideal wife, therefore she exists!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument>

------
akkartik
Related: the mathematics of 1950s dating.
[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251-f0...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251-f07/Site/Materials/Lectures/Lecture09/lecture09.pdf)
[pdf]

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asimjalis
The article also applies to picking business opportunities. Suppose you are
going to see N opportunities. According to the article you should pick the
best opportunity so far after N/e have passed.

Some questions this raises:

(a) How do you really know if an opportunity (or a wife) is any good? The
evaluation function seems to be a key ingredient for success.

(b) What if N is infinite.

(c) More realistically, suppose N is very large. Suppose I am going to see an
opportunity a day. If I live for another 40 years, that 14,610 days. So N =
14,610. Doing the math the article is saying that you do nothing for about 15
years. And then pick the best opportunity you have seen so far.

------
presidentender
I can't recall where I've seen this before, but it's
<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SultansDowryProblem.html>, the Sultan's Daughter
problem.

------
hendler
Would my wife use this to optimize her husband? I mean, is the optimization
mutual?

~~~
angelbob
I don't see any gender differences in the OA that would be important. If a
woman is willing to similarly watch for the best man and choose him when she
meets him, she should use the same algorithm.

~~~
_delirium
Indeed, it's not courting-specific at all, or even human-specific. The same
math could be used to answer questions like: "If you are a hamburger bun
selecting patties from a conveyor belt, how do you optimize your selection of
a quality patty?"

~~~
MrHyde
2‽

------
rbanffy
This kind of mathematical advisor could be a differentiator in the dating-site
market.

Any HNers working on one?

------
weirdkid
I wonder if this will fit on a Valentines Day card...

------
3ds
it's also a good example how heteronormativity works

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ecommando
You're mistaken... The mere fact that you've done this, and gone public with
it, guarantees that you'll be single for the rest of your life ;-)

Just kidding. Nice work!

------
pmichaud
How Not to Optimize your Wife: Using Calculus.

Geeks though, you gotta love them.

------
joezydeco
Why did this remind me of the "Ten Women" game?

<http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/uncategorized/ten-women/>

------
jamesshamenski
The author is so gonna get laid after writing this! He should publish it in
Vanity Fair.

------
kraemate
Dupe. I really dont think this deserves a repost. Was on the front page just
some months ago.

~~~
Frazzydee
Where?
[http://searchyc.com/submissions/%2522mathpages.com%2522?only...](http://searchyc.com/submissions/%2522mathpages.com%2522?only=domain&sort=by_date)

