

Finding Love Optimally  - skada
http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=1392

======
bengl3rt
Unfortunately, this does not solve the problem that many hackers that I know
have. They would have no trouble selecting between a number of different
applicants/candidates - they are having trouble with generating "deal flow" in
the first place, a.k.a actually meeting women.

They work 40-90 hours a week in an insular, male-dominated industry. Where do
they get the time and the energy to get the exposure to hone the skillset that
enables talking to women?

~~~
DeusExMachina
I can understand your point, but I think that in the end it's always feasible.
If you want to meet more women you have to realize they won't come to knock on
your door. So you have to give up a couple of hours in the evening where
instead if working you go out with the objective to meet more women.

~~~
danenania
Just going out with the vague intention of meeting women isn't going to get
you anywhere as a nerdy type of guy. A better approach is to do things that
you'll enjoy anyway where talking and getting to know others (including women)
is a core part of the activity.

A few that come to mind: creative writing groups, acting groups, language
learning groups and exchanges, book clubs. I'm sure there are plenty of
others. Besides being generally intellectually rewarding activities, women are
usually the majority in groups like these, and they are likely to be smart and
interesting to boot. The emphasis is also taken off of small talk and social
poise, and placed instead on intelligence, creativity, authenticity, and other
traits that nerds excel in. Even if you don't meet the girl of your dreams,
you can at least have a good time, develop your mind in some new directions,
and expand your social circle a bit.

~~~
DeusExMachina
Yes, thank you for the addition. I was meaning these activities, even though
only in an implied manner. Going out and talking to a woman out of nothing is
hard stuff that requires a lot of effort and the right personality.

Another couple of activities you can add to the list are singing in a choir
and dancing (I dance tango, for example). In both cases you are pretty much
guaranteed that women will exceed men in number.

~~~
john_b
I'll second the dancing idea. Salsa and other types of latin dance are
especially good, since the culture of those dance forms is (generally) that
there is nothing wrong in asking a girl to dance whether she is in a
relationship or not.

But if you're the introverted type and not comfortable with your dance skills
(like me when I started), you still have to swallow your pride and get out
there. There is no getting around that. Just don't go join a dance club (or
any other hobby-based group) with the sole intention of meeting women because
(1) you won't enjoy it and (2) the women will sense it.

------
dev_jim
I couldn't give you the math, but the optimal strategy is to always date two
or three women at any given time. This allows you to always keep your favorite
while giving an opportunity for new contenders to rise to the top. Now of
course this strategy only works for about a year with any individual girl
until exclusivity becomes an issue.

This is similar to how most companies solve the secretary (or at least the
software developer) problem. You have a body of candidates who get decimated
as you go from round 1 => round 2 => ... => round X.

~~~
Swizec
The problem with dating that many women at a time is that it's a giant waste
of time, effort and ultimately money.

I don't know about you, but I don't have the funds to go on that many dates
even if I am the kind of cheap who always splits the bill.

~~~
danssig
What are you wasting all your money on then? If you don't have the money to
take a girl out do you really think you're financially stable enough to have a
family?

~~~
Swizec
I'm a student. There just simply isn't any money to begin with.

~~~
danssig
Then why are you in a hurry to get married? I would expect dating to just be
for fun at the student phase.

~~~
Swizec
I'm not. I just said dating three people at a time is a drain on my resources
such as time, money and effort.

~~~
danssig
The main reason to date three people at a time is to find a wife.

------
luu
See also: Why we should hang out: a mathematical proof,
<http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/aus/419154651.html>

------
templaedhel
Obligatory XKCD, <http://xkcd.com/55/>

Have to admit, that XKCD sums up the article almost perfectly though.

~~~
Liu
There should be an algorithm that automatically searches and matches XKCD
strips to posts...

------
brohee
Mathematics and Sex ( [http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Sex-Clio-
Cresswell/dp/B005...](http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Sex-Clio-
Cresswell/dp/B005FOI9W2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317305535&sr=1-1) )
got a way more detailled discussion on mate finding strategies, quite an
enjoyable read.

------
MarkPNeyer
i've heard that the best way to find love is to stop searching for it, and
spend your time and efforts focused on self improvement and doing things you
like. this gibes with my recent experience.

i dated my first girlfriend from age 14 to age 20. when we started dating my
freshman year of high school, i fell for her right away. i learned so many
things from her, things most people my age and younger already knew, but had
escaped me because of the difficulty i have relating to people and
understanding social norms, and because i have bipolar disorder, which makes
any form of introspection terrifying. i grew to see her as a second mother.
the relationship was probably really good for me the whole time i was in high
school, but when i wanted to leave the state for college, she said she knew
i'd leave her and begged me not to. growing up immersed in disney bullshit, i
told myself that love meant never choosing your happiness over that of your
partner, so i stayed in our hometown of cincinnati, and went to a small
liberal arts college.

i was miserable at first, and it only got worse from there. by the time i was
halfway through my junior year, i'd attempted suicide twice. i felt trapped; i
wanted to live on campus and have friends and drink and do things kids my age
did, but i felt that choosing any of those things (which she had forbidden)
over being with her was choosing pleasure over love. i was afraid that if i
broke up with her, all of the girls i met in the future would ask why i broke
up with a girl after dating her for years, and see that as a reason not to
date me. at the same time, i thought that even if they wanted to date me, by
leaving my first love, i was implicitly leaving every girl i'd ever meet in
the future.

i wanted to be able to say that i had only loved one woman, ever, with all of
my heart. it seemed ridiculous to imagine myself saying 'well, i used to
really love this one woman, but now i love a different one.'

now, you can only bang your head into a wall so many times before the thought
of going around it or even climbing over it starts to sound more appealing,
and eventually i had the right combination of despair and hope, courage and
fear, to break up with her. within a week, i went from researching pawn shops
in cincinnati to see if i could buy a gun and shoot myself, to feeling like i
was the luckiest guy in the world, for having been through enough shit to shed
subtle tears of joy while drinking and playing poker with a few friends,
because i had wanted it so badly for so long.

i spent the next 5 years trying to find a girl to whom i could be that
dedicated and loving and loyal, a girl who felt the same way about me, a girl
i could marry and raise children and grow old with. every time i met a girl i
liked, i'd fall for her in like a week. i see now that because i was
approaching all of these relationships from a place of intense desire for them
to work, they never did.

for example, i had one awesome relationship with a girl i met at a bar, on a
night when i felt miserable and rejected because a girl i'd see maybe twice
told me she was seeing someone else, most likely becuase i was way too into
her. i went to the bar hoping to meet a hookup for casual sex. instead, i met
a girl whom i immediately felt was too special for that. we dated for a year
or so, and our relationship ended less than a month after we moved in
together, while i was crazy addicted to pot and experiencing a lot of
religious psychosis as a result of my bipolar disorder coupled with the
excessive drug use.

at first i was just happy to be out of the relationship, because we were
fighting a lot -mostly over my drug use and increasingly strong belief that i
was hacker-buddah-jesus. this happiness lasted about six months, and then
vanished over the course of a week, when a girl i'd been fooling around with
told me she didn't want to see me any more because i was smoking pot all the
time, out of shape, and more than a little nuts. i felt miserable. i knew my
life was in the shitter, and that the girl i'd broken up with months ago was
really great for me. i remember looking through photos i'd taken while we were
together, and finding a picture of a massive blueberry pancake we made one
sunday morning. when she suggested that instead of making several pancakes, we
should just make one big one with all the batter and all the blueberries, i
told her i loved her for the first time right then and there. i saw this
picture and burst into tears, feeling like the intuition i had years earlier -
that i was implicitly leaving all relationships by leaving the first one - was
right.

i decided to make an ok cupid account, in hopes that maybe a new relationship
would solve all of my problems. i started talking to a girl i met on there,
and before we met in person i told her my theory that it would possible to
trigger a standing electromagnetic wave in the earth's atmosphere if you got a
bunch of people thinking in such a way that their brainwaves caused a massive
schumann resonance. for some reason i was convinced that this could be caused
by some sort of giant public orgy. in my theory, this standing wave would act
as a carrier frequency for the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of all
people on earth, enlightening all minds and triggering the singularity.

for some reason this didn't scare her. the day we met in person for the first
time was also the day i'd decided to leave north carolina (where i was at the
time) for san francisco, to make the change from electronic trading to the
startup world. as normally happens, i fell for her very quickly and we agreed
to try the long distance thing. it was hard as hell, but we worked at it. in
december 2010, she came to spend christmas with my family. i have 8 siblings,
and we are very close with each other. when they met her and liked her, when
she yelled just as loud as the rest of us during heated games of mafia, i knew
i could be with her. i told her that i wanted to get engaged, becuase i was
afraid the long distance thing would be too tough otherwise. she said she
wasn't ready, and i left ohio to go back to california hopeful but almost
resigned to it ending, and a week later i was single again.

the day we broke up, the last thing she said to me was that i needed to get
psychotherapy, in particular a form called analysis, so that i could learn to
deal with my emotions.

this was 10 months ago. since then, after a couple of thousands of dollars
worth of therapy, a lot of journaling and meditation and introspection, i'm in
a completely different place. i'm not lookiging for love any more; i figure if
it's meant to happen, it will, and if it's not, i've loved enough to last me a
lifetime.

i've been in kiev, ukraine the last two months, working with an outsourcing
team here to launch my startup. the only person i knew on arrival was my
buisness partner, so i've spent a lot of time alone. i don't think i can
possibly overstate how much i've grown and learned in the past two months.
instead of running from or being completely overwhelmed by my negative
emotions, i sit with them, talk to them, ask them what's wrong and how i can
help them and thank them for letting me know how i'm hurting. when i do that,
they don't go away, but they no longer feel like something i'm suffering from,
so much as something i'm observing. instead of feeling like the part of me
that tells me i'm meant to cause the singularity and save the world from
destroying itself is some sort of asshole who's trying to fuck with me, i
realize now that it's a part of me that is lonely, scared, and afraid of
feeling as hurt as i've felt in the past. i no longer try to push it away or
ignore it or get mad at it; now i thank it for trying to help me, patiently
tell it that what it's doing doesn't make things better, and ask it to remind
me of pleasant memories like playing board games with my family over christmas
vacation when it gets upset.

i'm typing this in a restaurant at the airport, about to get on a flight back
home. i left california few months ago a tangled emotional mess, afraid of and
hating parts of myself, desparately searching for the love of another to heal
me. i'm returning feeling more calm and peaceful than i've ever felt in my
entire life. i feel immense gratitude for every fleeting feeling of pain or
pleasure, for every audible click of the keys on this keyboard, and for every
pixel in the laptop screen.

i have no idea if i'll ever find a girl to marry, and for the first time in my
life, i'm ok with that. i have all the love i need, from my parents, my
siblings, my friends, my cats, the people on reddit and facebook and google
plus who like the shit i write, and most importantly, from myself. somethings
tells me that entering a relationship in this state of mind is much more
likely to lead to something that lasts.

~~~
Fliko
I am going to be late for my class because of you, it was totally worth it
though. If you ever need a novel to read, go read VALIS by Phillip K. Dick,
your theory of schumann resonance reminded me of that novel.

------
ajays
For me, the biggest challenge is meeting women who I might find interesting.
I'm a techie, and, for some reason, I've always got along great with techie
women (or women in sciences or math). Maybe it's because they understand me
better; I don't know.

Even though I live in San Francisco, it is hard to meet women who are
attractive and with whom I can have a connection. IMO, OKCupid seems to be
filled with the more "artsy" type women; nothing wrong with them at all, but I
never seem to have a connection with them.

~~~
john_b
I think people pre-judge others too much. In older, much more traditional
cultures, marriages managed to remain stable in cases where the bride and
groom did not even meet until shortly before their wedding. That is a
completely different topic though, but my point is that the set of people who
you can live with happily and the set of people who you think you can live
with happily probably do not overlap as much as we would like to think.

Expecting a connection at first is unreasonable too. Connections are built by
shared experiences, not magical "love at first sight" moments. If you dismiss
someone immediately, you'll never have a chance to share experiences.

I'm not saying that you should set the pass band on your filter to infinity,
but the worst case scenario in talking to an artsy girl (or any other type of
girl who you don't expect to forge a long term relationship with) is that you
have a friendly conversation and learn a little.

At least, that's how it works for me. I've never dated a girl that was "my
type". I have an idea of what I'd like in a girl, but for some reason I seem
to meet (and enjoy being with) girls who don't fit that mold.

------
bartz
I was just getting excited about seeing the secretary problem reworked when
applied from the perspective of both the secretary and the employer, but
instead he took the romantic approach.

------
gwern
Which raises the question - what's the optimal strategy in the double-sided
version of the secretary problem? (I'm guessing that it probably involves
stopping the 'search' even earlier.)

