6 ms·

Finding Love Optimally

150 points by skada 15y ago

luu 15y ago
See also: Why we should hang out: a mathematical proof, http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/aus/419154651.html http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/aus/419154651.html
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
templaedhel 15y ago
Obligatory XKCD, http://xkcd.com/55/ http://xkcd.com/55/ Have to admit, that XKCD sums up the article almost perfectly though.
- sek 15y ago
  I thought these people just exist on TBBT.
- Liu 15y ago
  There should be an algorithm that automatically searches and matches XKCD strips to posts...
- jimktrains2 15y ago
  I(<3) should = <3, right?
bengl3rt 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
    - wladimir 15y ago
      Excellent suggestion! That has been my experience as well. It's better to focus on auxiliary activities where you'll meet women as part of the group, and have to work with them, instead of focusing on dating. It's much less awkward (as there are no high expectations), you're bound to have at least one shared interest, and you get to know them how they are in daily life...
    - adrianN 15y ago
      How about people who don't like activities where talking and getting to know other people is a core part?
      - sltkr 15y ago
dev_jim 15y ago
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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Swizec 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      I'm a student. There just simply isn't any money to begin with.
      - danssig 15y ago
        Then why are you in a hurry to get married? I would expect dating to just be for fun at the student phase.
        Swizec 15y ago
MarkPNeyer 15y ago
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.
ajays 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
brohee 15y ago
Mathematics and Sex ( http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Sex-Clio-Cresswell/dp/B005FOI9W2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317305535&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Sex-Clio-Cresswell/dp/B005... ) got a way more detailled discussion on mate finding strategies, quite an enjoyable read.
bartz 15y ago
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 15y ago
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.)

150 points by skada 15y ago

luu 15y ago

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

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

templaedhel 15y ago

Obligatory XKCD, http://xkcd.com/55/ http://xkcd.com/55/ Have to admit, that XKCD sums up the article almost perfectly though.

sek 15y ago
I thought these people just exist on TBBT.
Liu 15y ago
There should be an algorithm that automatically searches and matches XKCD strips to posts...
jimktrains2 15y ago
I(<3) should = <3, right?

bengl3rt 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - wladimir 15y ago
    Excellent suggestion! That has been my experience as well. It's better to focus on auxiliary activities where you'll meet women as part of the group, and have to work with them, instead of focusing on dating. It's much less awkward (as there are no high expectations), you're bound to have at least one shared interest, and you get to know them how they are in daily life...
  - adrianN 15y ago
    How about people who don't like activities where talking and getting to know other people is a core part?
    - sltkr 15y ago

dev_jim 15y ago

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.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Swizec 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    I'm a student. There just simply isn't any money to begin with.
    - danssig 15y ago
      Then why are you in a hurry to get married? I would expect dating to just be for fun at the student phase.
      - Swizec 15y ago

MarkPNeyer 15y ago

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.

ajays 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

brohee 15y ago

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

bartz 15y ago

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 15y ago

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.)